occurred to you,” asked Paynter, “that perhaps the men who have never committed murder are a varied and very extraordinary set? Perhaps every plain man’s life holds the real mystery, the secret of sins avoided.”      

       “Possibly,” replied Ashe. “It would be a long business to stop the next man in the street and ask him what crimes he never committed and why not. And I happen to be busy, so you’ll excuse me.”      

       “What,” asked the American, when he and the poet were alone, “is this guess of yours about the vanishing water?”      

       “Well, I’m not sure I’ll tell you yet,” answered Treherne, something of the old mischief coming back into his dark eyes. “But I’ll tell you something else, which may be connected with it; something I couldn’t tell until my wife had told you about our meeting in the wood.” His face had grown grave again, and he resumed after a pause:     

       “When my wife started to follow her father I advised her to go back first to the house, to leave it by another door and to meet me in the wood in half an hour. We often made these assignations, of course, and generally thought them great fun, but this time the question was serious, and I didn’t want the wrong thing done in a hurry. It was a question whether anything could be done to undo an experiment we both vaguely felt to be dangerous, and she especially thought, after reflection, that interference would make things worse. She thought the old sportsman, having been dared to do something, would certainly not be dissuaded by the very man who had dared him or by a woman whom he regarded as a child. She left me at last in a sort of despair, but I lingered with a last hope of doing something, and drew doubtfully near to the heart of the wood; and there, instead of the silence I expected, I heard a voice. It seemed as if the Squire must be talking to himself, and I had the unpleasant fancy that he had already lost his reason in that wood of witchcraft. But I soon found that if he was talking he was talking with two voices. Other fancies attacked me, as that the other was the voice of the tree or the voices of the three trees talking together, and with no man near. But it was not the voice of the tree. The next moment I knew the voice, for I had heard it twenty times across the table. It was the voice of that doctor of yours; I heard it as certainly as you hear my voice now.”      

    

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