ran blindly, dashing through the wood. He climbed the _vallum_, and
looked out, crouching, lest anybody should see him. Only the shadows were
changed, and a breath of cooler air mounted from the brook; the fields
were still and peaceful, the black figures moved, far away, amidst the
corn, and the faint echo of the high-pitched voices sang thin and distant
on the evening wind. Across the stream, in the cleft on the hill,
opposite to the fort, the blue wood smoke stole up a spiral pillar from
the chimney of old Mrs. Gibbon's cottage. He began to run full tilt down
the steep surge of the hill, and never stopped till he was over the gate
and in the lane again. As he looked back, down the valley to the south,
and saw the violent ascent, the green swelling bulwarks, and the dark
ring of oaks; the sunlight seemed to play about the fort with an aureole
of flame.

"Where on earth have you been all this time, Lucian?" said his cousin
when he got home. "Why, you look quite ill. It is really madness of you
to go walking in such weather as this. I wonder you haven't got a
sunstroke. And the tea must be nearly cold. I couldn't keep your father
waiting, you know."

He muttered something about being rather tired, and sat down to his tea.
It was not cold, for the "cozy" had been put over the pot, but it was
black and bitter strong, as his cousin expressed it. The draught was
unpalatable, but it did him good, and the thought came with great
consolation that he had only been asleep and dreaming queer, nightmarish
dreams. He shook off all his fancies with resolution, and thought the
loneliness of the camp, and the burning sunlight, and possibly the nettle
sting, which still tingled most abominably, must have been the only
factors in his farrago of impossible recollections. He remembered that
when he had felt the sting, he had seized a nettle with thick folds of