were particularly stunted, branches cut against a pallid,
greenish glow in the west--the last light.

Bobby wanted, if he could, to find that portion of the woods where he had
stood last night, fancying the trees straining in the wind like puny men,
visualizing a dim figure in a black mask which he had called his
conscience.

The forest was all of a pattern--ugly, unfriendly, melancholy. He went
on, however, hoping to glimpse that particular picture he remembered. He
left the path, walking at haphazard among the undergrowth. Ahead he saw a
placid, flat, and faintly luminous stretch. He pushed through the bushes
and paused on the shore of a lake, small and stagnant. Dead, stripped
trunks of trees protruded from the water. At the end a bird arose with a
sudden flapping of wings; it cried angrily as it soared above the trees
and disappeared to the south.

The morbid loneliness of the place touched Bobby's spirit with chill
hands. As a child he had never cared to play about the stagnant lake,
nor, he recalled, had the boys of the village fished or bathed there.
Certainly he hadn't glimpsed it last night. He was about to walk away
when a movement on the farther bank held him, made him gaze with eager
eyes across the sleepy water.

He thought there was something black in the black shadows of the
trees--a thing that stirred through the heavy dusk without sound. He
received, moreover, an impression of anger and haste as distinct as the
bird had projected. But he could see nothing clearly in this bad light.
He couldn't be sure that there was any one over there.

He started around the end of the lake, and for a moment he thought that
the shape of a woman, clothed in black, detached itself from the
shadow. The image dissolved. He wondered if it had been more
substantial than fancy.

"Who is that?" he called.

The woods muffled his voice. There was no answer. Nor was there, he
noticed, any crackling of twigs or rustling of dead leaves. If there
had been a woman there she had fled noiselessly, yet, as he went on
around the lake, his own progress was distinctly audible through the
decay of autumn.

It was too dark on the other side to detect any traces of a recent human
presence in the thicket. He couldn't quiet, however, the feeling that he
had had a glimpse of a woman clothed in black who had studied him
secretly across the stagnant stretch of the lake.

On the other hand, there was no logic in a woman's presence here at