acon, high in the air, seemed a
fantastically impossible thing. I pointed it out to Jervaise who was
holding his head down as if he were afraid the summer rain might do some
serious injury to his face.

"Some one up, anyway," was his comment.

"Very far up," I murmured. I could not quite believe, even then, that it
could be a window. I was disappointed when we had climbed the hill and
stood only a few feet below the beacon, to discover that this too, was
another instance of the all too credible commonplace. I suppose men like
Frank Jervaise never long to believe in the impossible. I was, however,
agreeably surprised to find that he could be nervous.

He hesitated, looking up at the prism of light that splayed out through
the first floor window, and set a silver fire to the falling rain.
"Suppose we'd better knock," he grumbled.

"D'you know whose window it is?" I asked.

Apparently he didn't. He made a dive into a deeper obscurity and I lost
him until I heard his knock. I was glad that he should have knocked with
such decent restraint, but all the effect of it was instantly shattered by
the response. For at his first subdued rap, a dog with a penetratingly
strident bark set up a perfectly detestable clamour within the house. It
was just as if Jervaise's touch on the door had liberated the spring of
some awful rattle. Every lovely impulse of the night must have fled
dismayed, back into the peace and beauty of the wood; and I was more than
half inclined to follow.

Until that appalling racket was set loose I had been regarding this
midnight visit to the farm as a natural and enticing adventure, altogether
in keeping with the dramatic movement preluded by the chime of the
stable-clock. That confounded terrier, whose voice so clearly proclaimed
his breed, had dragged us down to the baldest realism. We were intruders
upon the decencies of civilisation. That dog was not to be misled by any
foolish whimsies of the imagination. He was a thorough-going realist,
living in a tangible, smellable world of reality, and he knew us for what
we were--marauders, disturbers of the proper respectable peace of
twentieth century farms. He lashed himself into ecstasies of fury against
our unconventionality; he rose to magnificent paroxysms of protest that
passionately besought High Heaven and Farmer Banks to open the door and
let him get at us.

But no one came. There may have been other sounds coming from the house
besides that infur