interested. And at last he broke through the outermost line
of oak scrub and fern and stood panting in the open, a fat September
stag carrying a well-furnished head. His obvious course was to drop
down to the brown pools of Undercombe, and thence make his way towards
the red deer's favoured sanctuary, the sea. To Sylvia's surprise,
however, he turned his head to the upland slope and came lumbering
resolutely onward over the heather. "It will be dreadful," she
thought, "the hounds will pull him down under my very eyes." But the
music of the pack seemed to have died away for a moment, and in its
place she heard again that wild piping, which rose now on this side,
now on that, as though urging the failing stag to a final effort.
Sylvia stood well aside from his path, half hidden in a thick growth of
whortle bushes, and watched him swing stiffly upward, his flanks dark
with sweat, the coarse hair on his neck showing light by contrast. The
pipe music shrilled suddenly around her, seeming to come from the
bushes at her very feet, and at the same moment the great beast slewed
round and bore directly down upon her. In an instant her pity for the
hunted animal was changed to wild terror at her own danger; the thick
heather roots mocked her scrambling efforts at flight, and she looked
frantically downward for a glimpse of oncoming hounds. The huge antler
spikes were within a few yards of her, and in a flash of numbing fear
she remembered Mortimer's warning, to beware of horned beasts on the
farm. And then with a quick throb of joy she saw that she was not
alone; a human figure stood a few paces aside, knee-deep in the whortle
bushes.

"Drive it off!" she shrieked. But the figure made no answering
movement.

The antlers drove straight at her breast, the acrid smell of the hunted
animal was in her nostrils, but her eyes were filled with the horror of
something she saw other than her oncoming death. And in her ears rang
the echo of a boy's laughter, golden and equivocal.

THE STORY OF ST. VESPALUUS

"Tell me a story," said the Baroness, staring out despairingly at the
rain; it was that light, apologetic sort of rain that looks as if it
was going to leave off every minute and goes on for the greater part of
the afternoon.

"What sort of story?" asked Clovis, giving his croquet mallet a
valedictory shove into retirement.

"One just true enough to be interesting and not true enough to be
tiresome," said the Ba