ds know, dear?"

She nodded thoughtfully.

"Of course! There are several rooms quite ready. Mrs. Midgeley thought
that we might be bringing down some guests. I am quite sure that we can
make Doctor Harrison comfortable."

"No doubt about that, Lady Dominey," the doctor declared. "Let me be as
near to your apartment as possible."

There was a shade of anxiety in her face.

"You think that to-night something will happen?" she asked.

"To-night, or one night very soon," Dominey assented. "It is just as
well for you to be prepared. You will not be afraid, dear? You will have
the doctor on one side of you and me on the other."

"I am only afraid of one thing," she answered a little enigmatically. "I
have been so happy lately."

Dominey, changed into ordinary morning clothes, with a thick cord tied
round his body, a revolver in his pocket, and a loaded stick in his
hand, spent the remainder of the night and part of the early morning
concealed behind a great clump of rhododendrons, his eyes fixed upon the
shadowy stretch of park which lay between the house and the Black Wood.
The night was moonless but clear, and when his eyes were once accustomed
to the pale but sombre twilight, the whole landscape and the moving
objects upon it were dimly visible. The habits of his years of bush
life seemed instinctively, in those few hours of waiting, to have
reestablished themselves. Every sense was strained and active; every
night sound--of which the hooting of some owls, disturbed from their
lurking place in the Black Wood, was predominant--heard and accounted
for. And then, just as he had glanced at his watch and found that it was
close upon two o'clock, came the first real intimation that something
was likely to happen. Moving across the park towards him he heard the
sound of a faint patter, curious and irregular in rhythm, which came
from behind a range of low hillocks. He raised himself on his hands and
knees to watch. His eyes were fastened upon a certain spot,--a stretch
of the open park between himself and the hillocks. The patter ceased and
began again. Into the open there came a dark shape, the irregularity of
its movements swiftly explained. It moved at first upon all fours, then
on two legs, then on all fours again. It crept nearer and nearer, and
Dominey, as he watched, laid aside his stick. It reached the terrace,
paused beneath Rosamund's window, now barely half a dozen yards from
where he was crouching. Delibe