he called up,
"Walter! Walter!" from the foot of the staircase. "There, you see!" he
muttered, as Walter's voice answered from above.

But almost on the instant a woman's voice took up the cry. "Walter! What
has happened to Walter?" and as her son stepped out upon the landing Mrs.
a Cleeve came tottering through the corridor leading to her rooms--came in
disarray, a dressing-gown hastily caught about her, and a wisp of grey
hair straggling across her shoulder. Catching sight of Walter, she almost
fell into his arms.

"Thank God! Thank God you are safe!"

"But what on earth is the matter?" demanded Walter, scarcely yet aroused
from the torpor of his private misery.

"Poachers, no doubt." his father answered. "Macklin has been warning me
of this for some time. Take your mother back to her room. There is no
cause for alarm, Lucetta--if the affair were serious, we should have heard
more guns before this. You had best return to bed at once. When I learn
what has happened I will bring you word."

He strode away down the lower corridor, calling as he went to Narracott,
the butler, to fetch a lantern and unbolt the hall-door, and entered the
gunroom with Father Halloran at his heels.

"I cannot ask you to take a hand in this," he said, finding his favourite
gun and noiselessly disengaging it from the rack, pitch dark though the
room was.

"I may carry a spare weapon for you, I hope?"

"Ah, you will go with me? Thank you: I shall be glad of someone to carry
the lantern. We may have to do some scrambling: Narracott is infirm, and
Roger,"--this was the footman--"is a chicken-hearted fellow, I suspect."

The two men armed themselves and went back to the hall, where Father
Halloran in silence took the lantern from the butler. Then they stepped
out into the night.

Masses of cloud obscured the stars, and the two walked forward into a wall
of darkness which the rays of the priest's lantern pierced for a few yards
ahead. Here in the valley the night air lay stagnant: scarcely a leaf
rustled: their ears caught no sound but that of the brook alongside of
which they mounted the coombe.

"Better set down the lantern and stand wide of it," said the Squire, as
they reached the foot of the White Rock gully. "If they are armed, and
mean business, we are only offering them a shot." He paused at the sound
of a quick, light footstep behind him, not many paces away, and wheeled
about. "Who's there?" he challenged in a