s that she
uttered, he could not tell. Then suddenly turning round, she fled
away.

He watched her with fascinated eyes, watched her feet fly over the
lawns, watched her, without a single backward glance, vanish at last
through the small side door from which she had first issued. He wiped
the moisture from his forehead, and a little sob broke from his
throat. The vision of her face was still before him. He knew for a
certainty what it was that had terrified her. She had started to keep
her engagement, but she was afraid. She was afraid of him. Something
that he had done had betrayed him. She knew! His liberty--perhaps his
life--was in this girl's hands!

He crept out of the shrubbery and staggered down the drive, making his
way homeward across the hills as swiftly as his uncertain footsteps
would take him. It was dusk now, and he met no one. Yet his heart beat
at every sound--the clanking of a chain, attached to the fetlock of a
wandering horse, the still, mournful cry of an owl which floated out
from the plantation, the clatter of the small stones which his own
feet dislodged as he feverishly climbed the rocks. Above him, on the
other side of the road, towered the hill where he had sat and dreamed
as a boy, where Rochester had come and encouraged him to prate of his
ambitions.

He looked away from its dark outline with a little groan. Up on the
hillside flashed the lights of Blackbird's Nest. He stretched out his
hands and groped onwards.

CHAPTER XXII

SATON REASSERTS HIMSELF

Rochester asked only one question during those few days when he lay
between life and death. He opened his eyes suddenly, and motioned to
the doctor to stoop down.

"Who shot me?" he asked.

"It was an accident," the doctor assured him, soothingly.

Rochester said no more, but his lips seemed to curl for a moment into
the old disbelieving smile. Then the struggle began. In a week it was
over. A magnificent constitution, and an unshattered nerve, triumphed.
The doctors one by one took their departure. Their task was over.
Rochester would recover.

_"Who shot me?"_

The doctor had seen no reason to keep silence, and this question of
Rochester's had created something like a sensation as it travelled
backwards and forwards. Rochester had been shot in the left side, in
the middle of a field, where no accident of his own causing seemed
possible. One barrel only of his gun had been fired, and to account
for that a cock pheasant