appointment he both
desires and dreads.

He had given his gun to the keeper, who had already sped far ahead of
him, in the shooting-cart which his master had declined. His dog, a
black retriever, was at his heels, and both dog and man were somewhat
weary and stiff with exercise. But for the privilege of solitude, Aldous
Raeburn would at that moment have faced a good deal more than the two
miles of extra walking which now lay between him and Maxwell Court.

About him, as he trudged on, lay a beautiful world of English woodland.
After he had passed through the hamlet of Mellor, with its
three-cornered piece of open common, and its patches of
arable--representing the original forest-clearing made centuries ago by
the primitive fathers of the village in this corner of the Chiltern
uplands--the beech woods closed thickly round him. Beech woods of all
kinds--from forest slopes, where majestic trees, grey and soaring
pillars of the woodland roof, stood in stately isolation on the
dead-leaf carpet woven by the years about their carved and polished
bases, to the close plantations of young trees, where the saplings
crowded on each other, and here and there amid the airless tangle of
leaf and branch some long pheasant-drive, cut straight through the green
heart of the wood, refreshed the seeking eye with its arched and
far-receding path. Two or three times on his walk Aldous heard from far
within the trees the sounds of hatchet and turner's wheel, which told
him he was passing one of the wood-cutter's huts that in the hilly parts
of this district supply the first simple steps of the chairmaking
industry, carried on in the little factory towns of the more populous
valleys. And two or three times also he passed a string of the great
timber carts which haunt the Chiltern lanes; the patient team of brown
horses straining at the weight behind them, the vast prostrate trunks
rattling in their chains, and the smoke from the carters' pipes rising
slowly into the damp sunset air. But for the most part the road along
which he walked was utterly forsaken of human kind. Nor were there any
signs of habitation--no cottages, no farms. He was scarcely more than
thirty miles from London; yet in this solemn evening glow it would have
been hardly possible to find a remoter, lonelier nature than that
through which he was passing.

And presently the solitude took a grander note. He was nearing the edge
of the high upland along which he had been wa