hing! Chow-Chow is at his heels! Look out! Mark right!"

"Run!" panted Constance, leaping a fallen log.

The lovely June woodland was now echoing with the happy cries of the
chase, the ki-yi of excited lap-dogs, the breathless voices of the young
girls, the heavy crashing racket of stampeding young men rushing headlong
through bramble and thicket with a noise like a hurricane amid dead
leaves.

Vance's legs, terror weakened, wobbled as he fled; and after ten minutes
he took to a tree with a despairing scream.

Brown, looking back from the edge of a mountain pasture, saw the dogs
leaping frantically at his friend's legs as he shinned rapidly up the
trunk, and disappeared into the clustering foliage; saw three flushed
young girls come running up with cries of innocent delight; saw one of
them release a slender, black, furry, spidery thing which immediately ran
up the tree; heard distracted yells from Vance:

"For heaven's sake, take away that marmoset! I can't bear 'em--I hate
'em, ladies! Ouch! He's all over me! He's trying to get into my pocket!
Take him away, for the love of Mike, and I'll come down!"

But Brown waited to hear no more. Horror now lent him her infernal wings;
he fairly fluttered across the mountain side, sailed down the farther
slope, and into a lonely country road. Along this he cantered, observed
only by surprised cattle, until, exhausted, he slackened his pace to a
walk.

Rickety fences and the remains of old stone walls flanked him on either
hand; the clearings were few, the cultivated patches fewer. He
encountered no houses. On a distant hillside stood a weather-beaten barn,
the sky shining blue through its roof rafters.

Beyond this the road forked; one branch narrowed to a grassy cattle path
and presently ended at a pair of bars. Inside the bars was a stone barn;
beside the barn a house of the century before last--a low, square stone
house, half stripped of its ancient stucco skin, a high-roofed one-story
affair, with sagging dormers peering from the slates and little oblong
loop-holes under the eaves, from which the straw of birds' nests
fluttered in the breeze.

Surely this ancient place, even if inhabited--as he saw it was--must be
sufficiently remote from the outer world to insure his safety. For here
the mountain road ended at the barn-yard bars; here the low wooded hills
walled in this little world of house, barn, and orchard, making a silent,
sunny place under the blue sky, sweet