asons influenced his superiors in sending Neeland to investigate
this latest and oddest report: for one thing, although he had become
temporarily a Canadian for military purposes only, in reality he was an
American artist who, like scores and scores of his artistic fellow
Yankees, had spent many years industriously painting those sentimental
Breton scenes which obsess our painters, if not their critics. He was a
very bad painter, but he did not know it; he had already become a
promising soldier, but he did not realize that either. As a sportsman,
however, Neeland was rather pleased with himself.

He was sent because he knew the sombre and lovely land of Finistere pretty
well, because he was more or less of a naturalist and a sportsman, and
because the plan which he had immediately proposed appeared to be
reasonable as well as original.

It had been a stiff walk across country--fifteen miles, as against thirty
odd around by road--but neither cart nor motor was to enter into the
affair. If anybody should watch him, he was only a duckhunter afield,
crossing the marshes, skirting _etangs_, a solitary figure in the waste,
easily reconcilable with his wide and melancholy surroundings.

CHAPTER IX

L'OMBRE

Aulnes Woods were brown and still under their unshed canopy of October
leaves. Against a grey, transparent sky the oaks and beeches towered,
unstirred by any wind; in the subdued light among the trees, ferns,
startlingly green, spread delicate plumed fronds; there was no sound
except the soft crash of his own footsteps through shriveling patches of
brake; no movement save when a yellow leaf fluttered down from above or
one of those little silvery grey moths took wing and fluttered aimlessly
along the forest aisle, only to alight upon some lichen-spotted tree and
cling there, slowly waving its delicate, translucent wings.

It was a very ancient wood, the Forest of Aulnes, and the old trees were
long past timber value. Even those gleaners of dead wood and fallen
branches seemed to have passed a different way, for the forest floor was
littered with material that seldom goes to waste in Europe, and which
broke under foot with a dull, thick sound, filling the nostrils with the
acrid odour of decay.

Narrow paths full of dead leaves ran here and there through the woods, but
he took none of these, keeping straight on toward the northwest until a
high, moss-grown wall checked his progress.

It ran west through th