I pointed out that it was moonlight. "With the comet thrown in,"
said old Stuart.

"No," she insisted, "you MUST go by the road."

I still disputed.

She was standing near me. "To please ME," she urged, in a quick
undertone, and with a persuasive look that puzzled me. Even in the
moment I asked myself why should this please her?

I might have agreed had she not followed that up with, "The hollies
by the shrubbery are as dark as pitch. And there's the deer-hounds."

"I'm not afraid of the dark," said I. "Nor of the deer-hounds,
either."

"But those dogs! Supposing one was loose!"

That was a girl's argument, a girl who still had to understand that
fear is an overt argument only for her own sex. I thought too of
those grisly lank brutes straining at their chains and the chorus
they could make of a night when they heard belated footsteps along
the edge of the Killing Wood, and the thought banished my wish to
please her. Like most imaginative natures I was acutely capable of
dreads and retreats, and constantly occupied with their suppression
and concealment, and to refuse the short cut when it might appear
that I did it on account of half a dozen almost certainly chained
dogs was impossible.