ling due to the war throughout the beautiful district
in which Millsborough lay. Enough damage had been done already to the
great wood-sanctuaries. On one pretext or another men held their hands.

Ellesborough then was free to take time off when he would, and to spend
it in love-making. The engagement had been announced, and Ellesborough
believed himself a very happy man--with the slight drawbacks that may be
imagined.

In the first place--although, as he became better acquainted with
Rachel's varying moods and aspects, he fell more and more deeply under
the charm of her temperament--a temperament at once passionate and
childish, crude, and subtle, with many signs, fugitive and surprising, of
a deep and tragic reflectiveness; he became also more and more conscious
of what seemed to him the lasting effects upon her of her miserable
marriage. The nervous effects above all; shown by the vague "fears" of
which she had spoken to him, on one of their early walks together; and by
the gulfs of depression and silence into which she would often fall,
after periods of high, even wild spirits.

It was this constant perception of a state of nervous suffering and
irritability in this splendid physical creature--a state explained, as he
thought, by her story, which had put him instantly on his guard, when
that sinister vision at the window had sprung for a moment out of the
darkness. Before almost he could move towards it, it had gone. And with a
farewell smile at the woman he had just been holding in his arms, a smile
which betrayed nothing, he had hurried away from her to investigate the
mystery. A hasty word to Janet Leighton in the kitchen, and he was making
a rapid circuit of the farm, and searching the farm-yard; with no results
whatever.

Then he, Janet, and Hastings had held a hurried and secret colloquy in a
corner of the great cow-shed, as far from Rachel's sight and hearing as
possible. Clearly some one was haunting the farm for some malicious
purpose. Hastings, for the first time, told the story of the blood-marks,
and of two or three other supposed visions of a man, tall and stooping,
with a dark sallow face, which persons working on the farm, or walking
near it on the hill, had either seen or imagined. Ellesborough finally
had jumped on his motor-bicycle and ridden off to the police depot at
Millsborough. Some wind of the happenings at Great End Farm had already
reached the police, but they could throw no light on the