ble. That so rude an axe should have been laid so
untimely to the root of so glorious a tree filled him with sorrow.
That the tree should have heard the step of the woodman on his way to
the felling, haunted his memory.

So far, however, as Lyveden's health of mind was concerned, itself
grievously inopportune, the catastrophe could not have happened at a
more opportune moment. Trading upon the heels of his encounter with
Valerie, it made a terrific counter-irritant to the violent
inflammation which that meeting had set up. Yet if the back of the
sickness was broken, disorder and corrective, alike so drastic, were
bound seriously to lower the patient's tone. His splendid physical
condition supported its brother Mind and saw him well of his faintness,
but the two red days left their mark. Looking back upon them later,
Anthony found them made of the stuff of which dreams are woven--bitter,
monstrous dreams, wherein the impossible must be performed lest a worse
thing befall and a malignant eye peers beneath stones which even Misery
herself would leave unturned. How he had parted with Valerie he was
uncertain. He could not remember her going. Of her coming he knew
nothing at all. She had appeared and, he supposed, disappeared. Of
Winchester's attack upon him, and the subsequent chase, his memory was
clearer. How he had escaped, however, at the foot of the brier-clad
slope, he could not conceive. He could have sworn that for the last
thirty paces the man was not three feet behind....

He was thankful to get back to work, and plainly immensely relieved to
find that, during his absence, the others had made such progress with
the paling that the scene of his employer's seizure had been left well
behind.

A week had elapsed since that cloud-burst, and, as before, Lyveden was
finishing his lunch, when he noticed that Stokes, the second carpenter,
had not returned. The fellow had gone to his quarters, to fetch some
implement, nearly an hour before. When another half-hour had gone by,
Anthony, in some impatience, dispatched Blake for the tool. Twenty
minutes later the latter returned, chisel in hand, but with no news of
his mate. When it was five o'clock and there was still no sign of
Stokes, Anthony struck work and ordered an organized search. It seemed
rather hopeless, but, on the whole, the best thing to do. The man was
missing. If possible, more zealous than any, it was unthinkable that
he was playing truan