t one day of chopping it off with my hook
to make a clothes-line prop with. But I put off doing it, and then I
again thought that I would; but I forgot it, and didn't. And at last
it got too big, and now 'tis my enemy, and will be the death o' me.
Little did I think, when I let that sapling stay, that a time would
come when it would torment me, and dash me into my grave."

"No, no," said Winterborne and Marty, soothingly. But they thought it
possible that it might hasten him into his grave, though in another way
than by falling.

"I tell you what," added Winterborne, "I'll climb up this afternoon and
shroud off the lower boughs, and then it won't be so heavy, and the
wind won't affect it so."

"She won't allow it--a strange woman come from nobody knows where--she
won't have it done."

"You mean Mrs. Charmond? Oh, she doesn't know there's such a tree on
her estate. Besides, shrouding is not felling, and I'll risk that
much."

He went out, and when afternoon came he returned, took a billhook from
the woodman's shed, and with a ladder climbed into the lower part of
the tree, where he began lopping off--"shrouding," as they called it at
Hintock--the lowest boughs. Each of these quivered under his attack,
bent, cracked, and fell into the hedge. Having cut away the lowest
tier, he stepped off the ladder, climbed a few steps higher, and
attacked those at the next level. Thus he ascended with the progress
of his work far above the top of the ladder, cutting away his perches
as he went, and leaving nothing but a bare stem below him.

The work was troublesome, for the tree was large. The afternoon wore
on, turning dark and misty about four o'clock. From time to time Giles
cast his eyes across towards the bedroom window of South, where, by the
flickering fire in the chamber, he could see the old man watching him,
sitting motionless with a hand upon each arm of the chair. Beside him
sat Marty, also straining her eyes towards the skyey field of his
operations.

A curious question suddenly occurred to Winterborne, and he stopped his
chopping. He was operating on another person's property to prolong the
years of a lease by whose termination that person would considerably
benefit. In that aspect of the case he doubted if he ought to go on.
On the other hand he was working to save a man's life, and this seemed
to empower him to adopt arbitrary measures.

The wind had died down to a calm, and while he was weighing