He said he had come for someone."

"Come for someone," she repeated. "Did he say--" she went on
falteringly.

"No, he did not say for whom," I said quickly, noticing the sudden
shadow on her face and the tremulous voice.

"Are you really sure, sir?"

"Oh, quite sure," I answered cheerfully. "I did not even ask him." The
girl looked at me steadily for nearly a whole minute as though there
were many things she wished to tell me or to ask. But she said nothing,
and presently picked up her tray from the table and walked slowly out
of the room.

Instead of keeping to my original purpose and pushing on to the next
village over the hills, I ordered a room to be prepared for me at the
inn, and that afternoon I spent wandering about the fields and lying
under the fruit trees, watching the white clouds sailing out over the
sea. The Wood of the Dead I surveyed from a distance, but in the village
I visited the stone erected to the memory of the "Father of the
Village"--who was thus, evidently, no mythical personage--and saw also
the monuments of his fine unselfish spirit: the schoolhouse he built,
the library, the home for the aged poor, and the tiny hospital.

That night, as the clock in the church tower was striking half-past
eleven, I stealthily left the inn and crept through the dark orchard and
over the hayfield in the direction of the hill whose southern slope was
clothed with the Wood of the Dead. A genuine interest impelled me to the
adventure, but I also was obliged to confess to a certain sinking in my
heart as I stumbled along over the field in the darkness, for I was
approaching what might prove to be the birth-place of a real country
myth, and a spot already lifted by the imaginative thoughts of a
considerable number of people into the region of the haunted and
ill-omened.

The inn lay below me, and all round it the village clustered in a soft
black shadow unrelieved by a single light. The night was moonless, yet
distinctly luminous, for the stars crowded the sky. The silence of deep
slumber was everywhere; so still, indeed, that every time my foot kicked
against a stone I thought the sound must be heard below in the village
and waken the sleepers.

I climbed the hill slowly, thinking chiefly of the strange story of the
noble old man who had seized the opportunity to do good to his fellows
the moment it came his way, and wondering why the causes that operate
ceaselessly behind human life did not always select