alike cold and fateful in the impression that this man had made upon her, an extraordinary impression, for it would be impossible to imagine anything further removed from the ideas of Coldness and Fate than the idea of the cheerful and practical Pinckney. However, there it was, her heart was chilled with the thought of him and the instinctive knowledge that he was going to make a great alteration in her life.

She crossed the gravelled drive to the grass sward beyond. The night had altered marvellously; nearly every vestige of cloud had vanished, blown away by 26 the wind. The wind and the moon had the night between them and the air was balmy as the air of summer.

26

Phyl turned and looked back at the house with all its windows glittering in the moonlight, then she struck across the grass now almost dried by the wind.

Phyl had something of the night bird in her composition. She had often been out long before dawn to pick up night lines in the river and she knew the woods by dark as well as by day. She was out now for nothing but a breath of fresh air, she did not intend to stay more than ten minutes, and she was on the point of returning to the house when a cry from the woods made her pause.

One might have fancied that some human being was crying out in agony, but Phyl knew that it was a fox, a fox caught in a trap. She was confirmed in her knowledge by the barking of its mates; they would be gathered round the trapped one lending all the help they could—with their voices.

The girl did not pause to think; forgetting that she had no weapon with which to put the poor beast out of its misery, and no means of freeing it without being bitten, she started off at a run in the direction of the sound, entering the woods by a path that led through a grove of hazel; leaving this path she struck westward swift as an Indian along the road of the call.

Her mother’s people had been used to the wilds, and Phyl had more than a few drops of tracker blood in her veins; better than that, she had a trace of the wood instinct that leads a man about the forest and 27 makes him able to strike a true line to the west or east or north or south without a compass.

27

The trees were set rather sparsely here and the moonlight shewed vistas of withered fern. The wind had fallen, and in the vast silence of the night this place seemed unreal as a dream. The fox had evidently succeeded in liberating itself 

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