re rather horrible to those who
molest them."

"Horrible perhaps to those that believe in them, but you see I don't,"
retorted Sylvia.

"All the same," said Mortimer in his even, dispassionate tone, "I
should avoid the woods and orchards if I were you, and give a wide
berth to the horned beasts on the farm."

It was all nonsense, of course, but in that lonely wood-girt spot
nonsense seemed able to rear a bastard brood of uneasiness.

"Mortimer," said Sylvia suddenly, "I think we will go back to Town some
time soon."

Her victory had not been so complete as she had supposed; it had
carried her on to ground that she was already anxious to quit.

"I don't think you will ever go back to Town," said Mortimer. He
seemed to be paraphrasing his mother's prediction as to himself.

Sylvia noted with dissatisfaction and some self-contempt that the
course of her next afternoon's ramble took her instinctively clear of
the network of woods. As to the horned cattle, Mortimer's warning was
scarcely needed, for she had always regarded them as of doubtful
neutrality at the best: her imagination unsexed the most matronly dairy
cows and turned them into bulls liable to "see red" at any moment. The
ram who fed in the narrow paddock below the orchards she had adjudged,
after ample and cautious probation, to be of docile temper; to-day,
however, she decided to leave his docility untested, for the usually
tranquil beast was roaming with every sign of restlessness from corner
to corner of his meadow. A low, fitful piping, as of some reedy flute,
was coming from the depth of a neighbouring copse, and there seemed to
be some subtle connection between the animal's restless pacing and the
wild music from the wood. Sylvia turned her steps in an upward
direction and climbed the heather-clad slopes that stretched in rolling
shoulders high above Yessney. She had left the piping notes behind
her, but across the wooded combes at her feet the wind brought her
another kind of music, the straining bay of hounds in full chase.
Yessney was just on the outskirts of the Devon-and-Somerset country,
and the hunted deer sometimes came that way. Sylvia could presently see
a dark body, breasting hill after hill, and sinking again and again out
of sight as he crossed the combes, while behind him steadily swelled
that relentless chorus, and she grew tense with the excited sympathy
that one feels for any hunted thing in whose capture one is not
directly