In a few minutes, as I well knew, Plinny would be coming in search of
me, to persuade me back to the house to breakfast and bed. I stepped
down to the streamside, where the beehives stood in a row on the
brink, paused for a moment to listen to the hum within them, and note
that the bees were making ready to swarm, crossed the bridge, and
tried the rusty hasp of the door. It yielded stiffly; but as I
pulled the door inwards it brushed aside a mass of spider's web,
white and matted, that could not be less than a month old. Also it
brushed a clump of ivy overgrowing the lintel, and shook down about
half an ounce of powdery dust into my hair and eyes. I scarcely
troubled to look through. Clearly, the door had not been opened for
many weeks--possibly not since my last holidays.

I recrossed the bridge and inspected the side-gate. This opened, as
I have said, upon a lane never used but by the woodmen on Miss
Belcher's estate, and by them very seldom. It entered the park by a
stone bridge across the stream and by a ruinous gate, the gaps of
which had been patched with furze faggots. The roadway itself was
carpeted with last year's leaves from a coppice across the lane--
leaves which the winter's rains had beaten into a black compost; and
almost facing the side-gate was a stile whence a tangled footpath led
into the coppice.

I had stepped out into the lane, and was staring over the stile into
the green gloom of the coppice, when I heard Plinny's voice calling
to me from the house, and I had half turned to hail in answer when my
eyes fell on the upper bar of the stile.

Across the edge of it ran a dark brown smear--a smear which I