least, have been in no doubt how to feel towards
that stronghold of Satan--righteously thanking God he was not as those
reprehensible others, who passed in and out of its ever-swinging doors.
While towards this earth dominance, this dwarfing of human life by the
life of things he had hitherto called inanimate, he did not know how to
feel at all. It attacked some unarmoured, unprotected part of him.
Against its assault he was defenceless.

With a sense of escape from actual danger, whether physical or moral he
did not stay to enquire, he stumbled, a few minutes later, through a gap
in the earth-bank into the wet side lane. Arrived, he gave himself a
moment's breathing space. It was darker here than out upon the warren;
but, anyhow, this was a lane. It had direction and meaning. Men had
constructed it for the linking up of house with house, hamlet with
hamlet. Like all roads, it represented the initial instinct of communal
life, the basis of a reasoned social order, of civilization in short.
He walked forward over the soft couch of fallen, water-soaked leaves,
his boots squelching at times into inches of sucking mud, and his
spirits rose. He began to enter into normal relations both with himself
and with things in general. A hundred yards or so and the village green
would be reached.

Then on his left, behind an ill-kept quick-set hedge that guarded a strip
of garden and orchard, he became aware of movement. Among the apple trees
three small figures shuffled about some dark recumbent object. For the
most part they went on all fours, but at moments reared up on their hind
legs. Their action was at once silent, stealthy and purposeful. Our young
clergyman's shortness of sight rendered their appearance the more
peculiar. His normal attitude was not so completely restored, moreover,
but that they caused him another nervous tremor. Then he grasped the
truth; while the detective, latent in every moralist, sprang to
attention. Here were criminals to be brought to justice, criminals caught
red-handed. Reginald Sawyer, having been rather badly scared himself,
lusted--though honestly ignorant of any personal touch in the matter--to
very badly scare others.

Standing back beside the half-open gate, screened by the hedge, here high
and straggling, he awaited the psychological moment, ready to pounce. To
enter the orchard and confront these sinners with their crime, if their
activities did by chance happen to be legitimate, was to p