We had come into a wood and it was very dark under the trees. I wondered
why I should restrain the impulse to strangle him and leave him there? He
was no good, and, to me, quite peculiarly objectionable. It seemed, in
what was then my rather fantastic state of mind, that it would be a
triumph of whimsicality. I should certainly have resisted the impulse in
any case, but my attention was diverted from it at that moment by a sudden
pattering of feet along the leaves of the great trees under which we were
walking--light, clean, sharp, little dancing feet, springing from leaf to
leaf--dozens of them chasing each other, rattling ecstatically up and down
the endless terraces of wide foliage.

"Damn it all, it's beginning to rain like blazes," remarked the foolish
Jervaise.

"How much farther is it?" I asked.

He said we were "just there."

* * * * *

I saw the Home Farm first as a little square haze of yellow light far up
in the sky. I didn't realise the sharp rise in the ground immediately in
front of us, and that rectangular beacon, high in the air, seemed a
fantastically impossible thing. I pointed it out to Jervaise who was
holding his head down as if he were afraid the summer rain might do some
serious injury to his face.

"Some one up, anyway," was his comment.

"Very far up," I murmured. I could not quite believe, even then, that it