south and listening. Some had waited for an hour, some for two; yet
still there was no sound but the piping of the birds in white-thorn
hedges, the hollow lowing of kine knee-deep in grassy meadows, and the
long rush of the river through the sedge beside the pebbly shore; and
naught to see but quiet valleys, primrose lanes, and Warwick orchards
white with bloom, stretching away to the misty hills.

But still they stood and looked and listened.

The wind came stealing up out of the south, soft and warm and sweet and
still, moving the ripples upon the river with gray gusts; and, scudding
free before the wind, a dog came trotting up the road with wet pink
tongue and sidelong gait. At the throat of Clopton bridge he stopped and
scanned the way with dubious eye, then clapped his tail between his legs
and bolted for the town. The laughing shout that followed him into the
Warwick road seemed not to die away, but to linger in the air like the
drowsy hum of bees--a hum that came and went at intervals upon the
shifting wind, and grew by littles, taking body till it came unbroken as
a long, low, distance-muffled murmur from the south, so faint as
scarcely to be heard.

Nick Attwood pricked his keen young ears. "They're coming, Robin--hark
'e to the trampling!"

Robin Getley held his breath and turned his ear toward the south. The
far-off murmur was a mutter now, defined and positive, and, as the two
friends listened, grew into a drumming roll, and all at once above it
came a shrill, high sound like the buzzing of a gnat close by the ear.

Little Tom Davenant dropped from the finger-post, and came running up