pack was after him. The fox
had broken cover, and the hounds were in full cry.

Whither should he go? He knew not. Still clutching the empty gun--for
which he had not even one cartridge in his pockets--he made hopelessly
for the open park. Already some glimmer of light showed that he was
winning free of these accursed trees, which had stretched forth a
thousand hands to tear his flesh and trip his uncertain feet. That
way, at least, lay the world. In the wood he might have circled
blindly until captured.

Now a drawback of such roaring maelstroms of alarm and uncertainty is
their knack of submerging earlier and less dramatic passages in the
lives of those whom Fate drags into their sweeping currents. Lest,
therefore, the strangely contrived meeting between Sylvia and her
knight errant should be neglected by the chronicler, it is well to
return to those two young people at the moment when Sylvia was
declaring her unimpaired power of standing without support.

Trenholme was disposed to take everything for the best in a magic
world. "Whatever is, is right" is a doctrine which appeals to the
artistic temperament, inasmuch as it blends fatalism and the action of
Providence in proportions so admirably adjusted that no philosopher
yet born has succeeded in reducing them to a formula. But Eve did not
bite the apple in that spirit. It was forbidden: she wanted to know
why. Sylvia's first thought was to discover a reasonable reason for
Trenholme's presence. Of course, there was one that jumped to the eye,
but it was too absurd to suppose that he had come to the tryst in
obedience to the foolish vagaries which accounted for her own
actions. She blushed to the nape of her neck at the conceit, which
called for instant and severe repression, and her voice reflected the
passing mood.

"I don't wish to underrate the great service you have rendered me,"
she said coldly, "and I shall always be your debtor for it; but I can
not help asking how you came to be standing under the cedars at this
hour of the night?"

"I wonder," he said.

She wriggled her shoulder slightly, as a polite intimation that his
hand need not rest there any longer, but he seemed to misinterpret the
movement, and drew her an inch or so nearer, whereupon the wriggling
ceased.

"But that is no answer at all," she murmured, aware of a species of
fear of this big, masterful man: a fear rather fascinating in its
tremors, like a novice's cringing to the vibration