as I mostly was, while the other two had chattered
and played about our mother; and when presently I stayed behind for a
purpose I remember that I made no effort to catch them up. I knew the
way perfectly, of course, and had no fear of the dark. Oddly enough I
had no fear of that. I was far less imaginative in the night than in
the day. Besides that, by the time I was ready to go after them I had
much else to think of.

I must have been looking at him for some time before I made out that
he was there. So you may peer into a thicket a hundred times and see
nothing, and then a trick of the light or a flutter of the mood and
you see creatures where you had been sure was nothing. As children
will, I had stayed longer than I need, looking and wondering into the
wood, not observing but yet absorbing the effects of the lights and
shades. The trees were sapling chestnuts if I am not mistaken, Spanish
chestnuts, and used for hop-poles in those parts. Their leaves decay
gradually, the fleshy part, so to speak, dropping away from the
articulation till at last bleached skeleton leaves remain and flicker
at every sigh of the wind. The ground was densely carpeted with other
leaves in the same state, or about to become so. The silver grey was
cross-hatched by the purple lines of the serried stems, and as the
view receded this dipped into blue and there lost itself. It was very
quiet--a windless fall of the light. To-day I should find it most
beautiful; and even then, I suspect, I felt its beauty without knowing
it to be so. Looking into it all without realising it, I presently and
gradually did realise something else: a shape, a creature, a thing of
form and pressure--not a wraith, not, I am quite certain, a trick of
the senses.

It was under a clump of the chestnut stems, kneeling and sitting on
its heels, and it was watching me with the bright, quick eyes of a
mouse. If I were to say that my first thought was of some peering and
waiting animal, I should go on to qualify the thought by reference to
the creature's eyes. They were eyes which, like all animals', could
only express one thing at a time. They expressed now attention, the
closest: not fear, not surprise, not apprehension of anything that I
might be meditating against their peace, but simply minute attention.
The absence of fear, no doubt, marked their owner off from the animals
of common acquaintance; but the fact that they did not at the same
time express the being itsel