us of a curious excitement he rowed still further in to the bank,
and again spoke to the invisible woman. In vain. He began then to doubt
his own eyes. Had it been a mere illusion produced by some caprice of the
searchlight opposite? But the face!--the features of it were stamped on
his memory, the gaunt bitterness of them, the brooding misery.

How could he have imagined such a thing?

Much perplexed and rather shaken in nerve, he rowed back across the
pond--to hear the band tuning in the flower-filled drawing-room, as he
approached the house.

CHAPTER IX

About ten o'clock on the night of the ball at Beechmark, a labourer was
crossing the park on his way home from his allotment. Thanks to
summertime and shortened hours of labour he had been able to get his
winter greens in, and to earth up his potatoes, all in two strenuous
evenings; and he was sauntering home dead-tired. But he had doubled his
wages since the outbreak of war and his fighting son had come back to him
safe, so that on the whole he was inclined to think that the old country
was worth living in! The park he was traversing was mostly open pasture
studded with trees, except where at the beginning of the eighteenth
century the Lord Buntingford of the day had planted a wood of oak and
beech about the small lake which he had made by the diversion of two
streamlets that had once found a sluggish course through the grassland.
The trees in it were among the finest in the country, but like so much of
English woodland before the war, they had been badly neglected for many
years. The trees blown down by winter storms had lain year after year
where they fell; the dead undergrowth was choking the young saplings; and
some of the paths through the wood had practically disappeared.

The path from the allotments to the village passed at the back of the
wood. Branching off from it, an old path leading through the trees and
round the edge of the lake had once been frequently used as a short cut
from the village to the house, but was now badly grown up and indeed
superseded by the new drive from the western lodge, made some twenty
years before this date.

The labourer, Richard Stimson, was therefore vaguely surprised when he
turned the corner of the wood and reached the fork of the path, to see a
figure of a woman, on the old right-of-way, between him and the wood, for
which she seemed to be making.

It was not the figure of anyone he knew. It was a lady, app