ken. Five minutes brought her to an open space beyond.
Trembling, breathless, and most suspiciously near tears, she sank upon
the ground.

"The beasts!" ejaculated Trix opprobriously, and not as the mere
statement of an obvious fact. She took off her hat, which flight had
flung to a somewhat rakish angle, and blinked vigorously towards the
trees. She was _not_ going to cry.

Presently fright gave place to interest. She gazed around, curious,
speculative. It was an unusual wood, a strange wood, a wood of holly
trees, with a scattered sprinkling of beech trees. The grey twisted
trunks of the hollies gleamed among the dark foliage, giving an eerie and
almost uncanny atmosphere to the place. It was extraordinarily silent,
too; and infinitely lonelier than the deserted moorland. It gave Trix an
odd feeling of unpleasant mystery. Yet there was nothing for it but to
face the mystery, to see if she could not find some way out further adown
the wood. Not for untold gold would she again have faced those horned
beasts behind her.

A tiny narrow path led downhill from the cleared space. Trix set off down
it, swinging her hat airily by the brim the while. Presently the sense of
uncanniness abated somewhat; the elfin in her went out to meet the
weirdness of the wood.

Now and again she stopped to pick and eat whortleberries from the massed
bushes beneath the trees. She did not particularly like them, truly;
nevertheless she was still young enough to pick and eat what nature had
provided for picking and eating, and that for the mere pleasure of being
able to do so. Also, at this juncture the action brought confidence in
its train.

Presently, through the trees facing her, she saw a wall, a high wall, a
brick wall, and quite evidently bordering civilization.

"It can't go on for ever," considered Trix. "It must come to an end some
time, either right, or left. And I'm not going back." This last
exceedingly firmly.

She went forward, scrutinizing, anxious. And then,--joyful and welcome
sight!--a door, an open door came into view. A mound of half-carted leaf
mould just without showed, to any one endowed with even the meanest
powers of deduction, that someone--some man, probably--was busy in the
neighbourhood.

Trix made hastily for the door. The next moment she was through it, to
find herself face to face with a man and a wheelbarrow. Trix came to a
standstill, a standstill at once sudden and unpremeditated. The man
dropped the