rd where she was. She answered briskly, a woman
determined to be brave and not a burden, that nobody should enter the
place without feeling the weight of her grandfather's stick. She
added, and here came in the other woman, that I was not to be long
absent. This touched me sweetly, for it showed that Marget was
thinking less of her own safety, or, at the moment, even of her
mother's, than of mine in the night outside. Honestly, I went dancing
from her side with a wine of joy in me that I had never tasted, for she
had shown that I was something to her, perhaps more than something. I
might have been drunk, and if I had I could not have been more lost
than I was in the darkness behind the Dover House, because it instantly
swallowed me up.

There is a darkness to which, after a little, the eye so accustoms
itself that it can see trees and rocks and even faces in contour.
There is another darkness which seals the eyes and numbs the mind and
even weights the feet as with lead. This was that night's darkness, so
pall-like that I was simply lost in it.

Nevertheless, calling up all my sense of locality, and feeling the way
lightly with my bare, ready sword, I started to make a circle of the
Dower House. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty cautious steps, with my
sword-point probing the way, and it touched something soft and
yielding. That something a-sort of whimpered, as a dog caught poaching
would, or as a man might who felt a quick pain. A sword-prick stings,
and the something leapt erect and with a curse turned at me, when I
instinctively fell on guard. Another sword struck at mine, my blade
slid up this other, caught in the handle and wrenched it from the
unseen hand. The weapon fell among the bracken, but my man thought
more of getting away than of looking for it, so he doubled round a tree
and was gone.

Evidently I had struck the investing circle, and I went on cautiously,
but never another figure did I perceive, though, before me, ran many
soft noises of as many retreats. Finally there was a suppressed rush
away, and with that I arrived at the front door of the Dower House to
hear a mother's cry of distress, "Marget, Marget! oh, Marget, Marget!"

"Where is she?" said I anxiously.

"She grew alarmed for you," answered her mother more anxiously, "and
went out, although I tried to keep her. Hardly had she gone when I
heard a smothered sob, and then there was a hustle of feet as if she
were being carried oft by f