. As she walked on she saw it rolled into
woods and deeps filled with bracken; she saw stretches of hillocky,
fine-grassed rabbit warren, and hollows holding shadowy pools; she
caught the gleam of a lake with swans sailing slowly upon it with curved
necks; there were wonderful lights and wonderful shadows, and brooding
stillness, which made her footfall upon the road a too material thing.

Suddenly she heard a stirring in the bracken a yard or two away from
her. Something was moving slowly among the waving masses of huge fronds
and caused them to sway to and fro. It was an antlered stag who rose
from his bed in the midst of them, and with majestic deliberation
got upon his feet and stood gazing at her with a calmness of pose
so splendid, and a liquid darkness and lustre of eye so stilly and
fearlessly beautiful, that she caught her breath. He simply gazed as her
as a great king might gaze at an intruder, scarcely deigning wonder.

As she had passed on her way, Betty had seen that the enclosing park
palings were decaying, covered with lichen and falling at intervals. It
had even passed through her mind that here was one of the demands
for expenditure on a large estate, which limited resources could not
confront with composure. The deer fence itself, a thing of wire ten
feet high, to form an obstacle to leaps, she had marked to be in such
condition as to threaten to become shortly a useless thing. Until this
moment she had seen no deer, but looking beyond the stag and across
the sward she now saw groups near each other, stags cropping or looking
towards her with lifted heads, does at a respectful but affectionate
distance from them, some caring for their fawns. The stag who had risen
near her had merely walked through a gap in the boundary and now stood
free to go where he would.

"He will get away," said Betty, knitting her black brows. Ah! what a
shame!

Even with the best intentions one could not give chase to a stag. She
looked up and down the road, but no one was within sight. Her brows
continued to knit themselves and her eyes ranged over the park itself in
the hope that some labourer on the estate, some woodman or game-keeper,
might be about.

"It is no affair of mine," she said, "but it would be too bad to let him
get away, though what happens to stray stags one doesn't exactly know."

As she said it she caught sight of someone, a man in leggings and shabby
clothes and with a gun over his shoulder, evident