hour
ago."

"Oh," cried Barbara warmly, "I am SO sorry!"

"So am I," said the doctor, and passed on rather abruptly; he ran down
the stone steps between the stone urns; and they saw him in talk with
the woodcutter. They could not see the woodcutter's face. He stood with
his back to them, but they saw something that seemed more moving than
any change of countenance. The man's hand holding the ax rose high above
his head, and for a flash it seemed as if he would have cut down the
doctor. But in fact he was not looking at the doctor. His face was set
toward the cliff, where, sheer out of the dwarf forest, rose, gigantic
and gilded by the sun, the trees of pride.

The strong brown hand made a movement and was empty. The ax went
circling swiftly through the air, its head showing like a silver
crescent against the gray twilight of the trees. It did not reach its
tall objective, but fell among the undergrowth, shaking up a flying
litter of birds. But in the poet's memory, full of primal things,
something seemed to say that he had seen the birds of some pagan augury,
the ax of some pagan sacrifice.

A moment after the man made a heavy movement forward, as if to recover
his tool; but the doctor put a hand on his arm.

"Never mind that now," they heard him say sadly and kindly. "The Squire
will excuse you any more work, I know."

Something made the girl look at Treherne. He stood gazing, his head a
little bent, and one of his black elf-locks had fallen forward over his
forehead. And again she had the sense of a shadow over the grass; she
almost felt as if the grass were a host of fairies, and that the fairies
were not her friends.

II. THE WAGER OF SQUIRE VANE

It was more than a month before the legend of the peacock trees was
again discussed in the Squire's circle. It fell out one evening, when
his eccentric taste for meals in the garden that gathered the company
round the same table, now lit with a lamp and laid out for dinner in a
glowing spring twilight. It was even the same company, for in the few
weeks intervening they had insensibly grown more and more into each
other's lives, forming a little group like a club. The American aesthete
was of course the most active agent, his resolution to pluck out the
heart of the Cornish poet's mystery leading him again and again to
influence his flighty host for such reunions. Even Mr. Ashe, the lawyer,
seemed to have swallowed his half-humorous prejudices; and the doct