t at the sight the other presented.

"You're wet through, Moira," I said, "and you look as if you've been
having a mud-bath. All the same you're a brick to have stood it all the
way you have."

"I'm not and I haven't," she said cryptically, and silenced my further
objections with a kiss.

When I looked out on the world again it was to see that the day had
already broken, and a dirty and bedraggled Albert Cumshaw was making his
way towards us with slow and painful steps.

CHAPTER IV.

WE ENTER THE VALLEY.

I cannot explain why just at that instant my heart gave a thump. There
was nothing for it to thump about. Cumshaw, toiling up the slope, for
all his woe-begone look, was the most ordinary figure imaginable, and
there was nothing in the landscape to excite or rivet attention. It was
a white dawn, and, though the rain had ceased long before, everything
was still dull and grey. In the hollows the mist lingered and hung
between us and the further view like a great white curtain. That and the
advancing Albert Cumshaw completed the picture, a picture that was
neither interesting nor sensational. Yet at the sight, as I've already
stated, my heart jumped queerly and unaccountably. Do coming events
really ever cast their shadows before them? Are we sometimes granted
visions of "the things beyond the dome?" I do not know, and, even if I
did, I would not care to express a definite opinion in my own case. I
have seen things dangerously like coincidences happen so often in my own
experience that I have grown chary of either affirming or denying that
there is something more than chance at the bottom of it all. Still the
fact remains that twice within twenty-four hours the same queer feeling
crept over me, and on each occasion the course of events proved that it
was premonition. But that is running a shade ahead of the story.

I ran down the slope to meet Cumshaw, and the first thing I noticed was
that there was a great livid bruise across his right temple.

"You've got a nasty knock there on your forehead," I greeted him, in the
casual self-contained fashion of the men who live in the open.

He answered me with one of those laughs that are nothing more than
almost soundless chuckles.

"Is it hurting?" I enquired with a trace of anxiety in my voice.

"Hurting, hell!" he said impolitely. "Of course it is."

"How did you do it? Was it an accident?"

"I don't look as if I did it just for amusement, do I?" he snarl