WANLOCK of Manor looked with a puckered face at the tiny jewel flaming in the hollow of his hand, and, for the hour fors wearing piety, cursed the lamented Lady Grace, his sister, haut en bas, with all the fury of his bitter disappointment. The harridan had her revenge! last night he dreamt her envoys by their wailings made the forest hideous; already amongst the Shadows of the monstrous other world, she must be chuckling (if the Shades have laughter) through her toothless gums at the chagrin of her brother, for the first of the seven shocks of evil fortune had that moment staggered him, and he was smitten to the vitals in his purse and pride.

The brooch, so wretchedly inadeqate as consolation for the legacy he had long anticipated, had seemed last night as he peered at it with dubious eyes a bauble wholly innocent, and he had laughed at its sinister reputation, which in a last vagary of her spiteful humour she had been at pains to apprise him of in a posthumous private letter. "Seven shocks of dire disaster, and the last the worst," he had read in the crabbed writing of the woman who, even in prosperity, could never pardon him his luckless speculation with the money that was meant to be her dowry; he

had sneered at her pagan folly, but now the premonstration bore a different aspect; he was stunned with the news that his law-plea with Paul Mellish of The Peel was lost, and that the bare expenses of that longprotracted fight should cost him all that was left of his beggared fortunes. But that was not the worst of it, for Mellish, as in pity of a helpless foe, had waived his admitted claim to the swampy field which was the object of their litigation. The first blow, surely, with a vengeance!

For a moment Wanlock, now assured of some uncanny essence in the jewel, thought to defend himself by its immediate destruction, and then he had a craftier inspiration. He strode across the room, threw up the window-sash, and bellowed upon Stephen, his idle son, the spoiled monopolist of what love he had to spare.

"You see this brooch?" he said when the lad, with a grey dog at his heels, came in with a rakish swagger from his interrupted dalliance with the last maid (so to call her) left of Wanlock's retinue.

They looked at it together as it lay in the father's hand -a garnet, out en cabochon, smoothly rounded like a blob of claret by the lapidary, clasped by thin gold claws, and the dog, with eyes askance, stood near them, wrapt in oogi

way.

Wanlock leaned upon his cane, with the grey dog at his heels, and let the exultation of the tidings well through all his being. The woods were sombre round about him: silent and sad, bereft of voices, for it was the summer's end, and birds were grieving their departed children. And yet not wholly still, the forest, for in its dark recesses something unexpressive moved and muttered. His joy ebbed out, his new mistrusts beset him; with a wave of the hand he sent the dog among the undergrowth, and when it disappeared, there rose among the tangle of the wood an eerie call, indefinite, despondent, like a dirge. Had the land itself a voice and memory of a golden age of sunshine and eternal Spring, thus might it be lamenting. But still-but still 'twas not a voice of nature, rather to the ear of Wanlock like the utterance of a creature lost in some strange country looking for home and love. So call the fallen angels in the interspace, remembering joys evanished.

A hand fell on the listener's shoulder: he flinched and turned to look in the face of his daughter Mirren.

"Have you heard the news?"

VOL. CLXXXVI.—NO. MCXXX.

she asked him, breathing deeply, with a wan and troubled aspect.

He held up an an arresting hand, and "Hush!" he said, "there is something curious in the wood. . . . Did ye not hear it? Something curious in the wood. . . . In the wood. Did ye not did ye not hear it?" and his head sank down upon his shoulders; his eyes went questing through the columns of the trees.

Again the cry rose, farther in the distance, burdened with a sense of desolation.

"A bittern," said Mirren; "it can only be a bittern."

"Do ye think I have not thought of that?" asked Wanlock. "Have ye ever heard a bittern boom at this time of the year, and in the middle of the day?"

"I have heard it once or twice at night of late," said his daughter. "It can only be a bittern, or some other creature may be wounded. Do you know that The Peel has been plundered? Last night the strongroom was broken into."

"And robbed of the Mellish jewels?" broke in Wanlock, with exultant intuition.

"Yes, and a great collection of antique gems entrusted to Mellish for the purpose of a monograph he was writing," said the daughter.

"A monograph ?" asked Wanlock, still with eyes bent on the wood from which the dog returned indifferent.

"It is a book on gems he has been busy writing.'

Wanlook sneered. "A book!" said he. "I'm thinking he'd 3 F