lack photograph; twig and leaf, and silent birds,
stood out like motes in the moonbeams. But there were fine intervals of
utter darkness, wide pools and high cascades of pitch, with never a
bubble in the way of detail. And there was one bird to be heard, giving
its own glory to the glorious night. But I was not long alive to the
heavenly song, or to the beauty of the moonlit wood.

I had entered by way of a spare site a little higher up than the
Delavoyes', who, unlike some of their newer neighbours, had not a garden
gate into the wood. I had penetrated some score yards into the pitch and
silver of leafy tree and open space when I became aware that someone
else had entered still higher up, and that our courses were converging.
I thought for a moment that it might be Uvo; but there was something
halt yet stealthy about the unseen advance, as of a shackled man
escaping; and I knew who it was before I myself stole and dodged to get
a sight of him. It was Captain Ricardo, creeping clumsily, often pausing
to lean hard upon his tremendous stick. At first I thought he had two
sticks; but the other was not one; the other was a hunting crop, for I
saw the lash unloosed in one of the pauses, and a tree-trunk flicked
again and again, about the height of a man's shoulder, as if for
practice.

When the limping, cringing figure again proceeded on its way, the big
stick was in the left hand, the crop in the right, and I was a second
sneak following the first, in the direction of the Temple of Bacchus.

I saw him stop and listen before I heard the voices. I saw the crop
raised high in the moonlight, as if in the taking of some silent vow,
and I lessened the distance between us with impunity, for he had never
once looked round. And now I too heard the voices; they were on the
other side of the temple wall; and this side was laved with moonlight,
so that the edges of the crumbling stucco made seams of pitch, and
Ricardo's shadow crouched upon the wall for a little age before his bent
person showed against it.

Now he was at one end of the wall, peeping round, listening, instead of
showing himself like a man. My blood froze at his miserable tactics. I
had seen men keep cover under heavy fire with less precaution than this
wretch showed in spying on his guilty wife; yet there was I copying him,
even as I had dogged him through the wood. Now he had wedged himself in
the heavy shadow between the wall and the one whole pillar at right
ang