came. It seemed to me that the mist even penetrated into
the room about me and spread inwardly over my thoughts.

"Is this the way to the Manor House?" I asked again, louder, fighting
my inward confusion and weakness. "Can _no one_ tell me?"

Then apparently everyone began to answer at once, or rather, not to
answer directly, but to speak to each other in such a way that I could
easily overhear. The voices of the men were deep, and of the women
wonderfully musical, with a slow rhythm like that of the sea, or of the
wind through the pine-trees outside. But the unsatisfactory nature of
what they said only helped to increase my sense of confusion and
dismay.

"Yes," said one; "Tom Bassett _was_ here for a while with the sheep,
but his home was not here."

"He asks the way to a house when he does not even know the way to his
own mind!" another voice said, sounding overhead it seemed.

"And could he recognise the signs if we told him?" came in the singing
tones of a woman's voice close behind me.

And then, with a noise more like running water, or wind in the wings of
birds, than anything else I could liken it to, came several voices
together:

"And what sort of way does he seek? The splendid way, or merely the
easy?"

"Or the short way of fools!"

"But he must have _some_ credentials, or he never could have got as far
as this," came from another.

A laugh ran round the room at this, though what there was to laugh at I
could not imagine. It sounded like wind rushing about the hills. I got
the impression too that the roof was somehow open to the sky, for their
laughter had such a spacious quality in it, and the air was so cool and
fresh, and moving about in currents and waves.

"It was I who showed him the way," cried a voice belonging to someone
who was looking straight into my face over the table. "It was the
safest way for him once he had got so far----"

I looked up and met his eye, and the sentence remained unfinished. It
was the hurrying, shadowy man of the hillside. He had the same shifting
outline as the others now, and the same veiled and shaded eyes, and as
I looked the sense of terror stirred and grew in me. I had come in to
ask for help, but now I was only anxious to be free of them all and out
again in the rain and darkness on the moor. Thoughts of escape filled
my brain, and I searched quickly for the door through which I had
entered. But nowhere could I discover it again. The walls were bare;
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