kward start of alarm, as Ellesborough suddenly turned and walked
towards the window. He had allowed himself, in his eagerness to see, to
press too near. He had exposed himself? He did not really believe that he
had been discovered--unless the American was an uncommonly cool hand! Any
way, his retreat to the wooded cover of the hill had been prompt. Once
arrived in the thick plantation on the crest, he had thrown himself down
exhausted. But as he sat panting there, on the fringe of the wood, he had
fancied voices and the flash of a light in the hollow beneath him. These
slight signs of movement, however, had quickly disappeared. Darkness and
silence resumed possession of the farm, and he had had no difficulty in
finding his way unmolested through the trees to the main road, and to the
little town, five miles nearer to London than Millsborough, at which he
had taken a room, under his present name of Wilson.

The wooded common, indeed, with its high, withered bracken, together with
the hills encircling the farm, had been the cover from which he had
carried out his prying campaign upon his former wife. As he sat or knelt,
mechanically, under the high and shadowy spaces of the Abbey, his mind
filled with excited recollections of that other evening when, after
tearing his hand badly on some barbed wire surrounding one of Colonel
Shepherd's game preserves, so that it bled profusely, and he had nothing
to bandage it with, he had suddenly become aware of voices behind him,
and of a large party of men in khaki--Canadian foresters, by the look
of them, from the Ralstone timber camp, advancing, at some distance, in a
long extended line through the trees; so that they were bound to come
upon him if he remained in the wood. He turned back at once, faced the
barbed wire again, with renewed damage both to clothes and hands, and
ran, crouching, down the green road leading to the farm, his wound
bleeding as he ran. Then he had perceived an old labourer making for him
with shouts. But under the shelter of the cart-shed, he had first
succeeded in tying his handkerchief so tightly round his wrist, with his
teeth and one hand, as to check the bleeding, which was beginning to make
him feel faint. Then, creeping round the back of the farm, he saw that
the upper half of the stable door was open, and leaping over it, he had
hidden among the horses, just as Halsey came past in pursuit. The old
man--confound him!--had made the circuit of the farm, a