all right, Miss Sara? Shall I see you up to the house?"

"No, thanks, Clegg," she said. "I'm--I'm quite all right. You can go
back to your breakfast."

"Very good, miss." He touched his hat and plunged back again into the
woods.

The girl stood still, looking after him. She was rather white, but she
remained very erect and taut until the keeper had disappeared from view.
Then the tense rigidity of her figure slackened, as a stretched wire
slackens when the pull on it suddenly ceases, and she leaned helpless
against the trunk of a tree, limp and shaking, every fine-strung nerve
ajar with the strain of her recent encounter with Black Brady. As she
felt her knees giving way weakly beneath her, a dogged little smile
twisted her lips.

"You are a cool 'and, and no mistake," she whispered shakily, an
ironical gleam flickering in her eyes.

She propped herself up against the friendly tree, and, after a few
minutes, the quick throbbing of her heard steadied down and the colour
began to steal back into her lips. At length she stooped, and, picking
up her hat, which had fallen off and lay on the ground at her feet,
she proceeded to make her way through the woods in the direction of the
house.

Barrow Court, as the name implied, was situated on the brow of a hill,
sheltered from the north and easterly winds by a thick belt of pines
which half-encircled it, for ever murmuring and whispering together as
pine-trees will.

To Sara Tennant, the soft, sibilant noise was a beloved and familiar
sound. From the first moment when, as a child, she had come to live
at Barrow, the insistent murmur of the pines had held an extraordinary
fascination for her. That, and their pungent scent, seemed to be
interwoven with her whole life there, like the thread of some single
colour that persists throughout the length of a woven fabric.

She had been desperately miserable and lonely at the time of her advent
at the Court; and all through the long, wakeful vigil of her first
night, it had seemed to her vivid, childish imagination as though
the big, swaying trees, bleakly etched against the moonlit sky, had
understood her desolation and had whispered and crooned consolingly
outside her window. Since then, she had learned that the voice of
the pines, like the voice of the sea, is always pitched in a key that
responds to the mood of the listener. If you chance to be glad, then the
pines will whisper of sunshine and summer, little love idylls tha