He started up the path, side by side with Doctor Groom.

“Are you coming?” Graham asked Bobby.  Bobby shook his head.  “I don’t want to.  I’d rather stay outside.  You’d better be there, Hartley.”

Graham followed the others while Bobby wandered from the court and started down a path that entered the woods from the rear of the house.

Immediately the forest closed greedily about him.  Here and there, where the trees were particularly stunted, branches cut against a pallid, greenish glow in the west—­the last light.

Bobby wanted, if he could, to find that portion of the woods where he had stood last night, fancying the trees straining in the wind like puny men, visualizing a dim figure in a black mask which he had called his conscience.

The forest was all of a pattern—­ugly, unfriendly, melancholy.  He went on, however, hoping to glimpse that particular picture he remembered.  He left the path, walking at haphazard among the undergrowth.  Ahead he saw a placid, flat, and faintly luminous stretch.  He pushed through the bushes and paused on the shore of a lake, small and stagnant.  Dead, stripped trunks of trees protruded from the water.  At the end a bird arose with a sudden flapping of wings; it cried angrily as it soared above the trees and disappeared to the south.

The morbid loneliness of the place touched Bobby’s spirit with chill hands.  As a child he had never cared to play about the stagnant lake, nor, he recalled, had the boys of the village fished or bathed there.  Certainly he hadn’t glimpsed it last night.  He was about to walk away when a movement on the farther bank held him, made him gaze with eager eyes across the sleepy water.

He thought there was something black in the black shadows of the trees—­a thing that stirred through the heavy dusk without sound.  He received, moreover, an impression of anger and haste as distinct as the bird had projected.  But he could see nothing clearly in this bad light.  He couldn’t be sure that there was any one over there.

He started around the end of the lake, and for a moment he thought that the shape of a woman, clothed in black, detached itself from the shadow.  The image dissolved.  He wondered if it had been more substantial than fancy.

“Who is that?” he called.

The woods muffled his voice.  There was no answer.  Nor was there, he noticed, any crackling of twigs or rustling of dead leaves.  If there had been a woman there she had fled noiselessly, yet, as he went on around the lake, his own progress was distinctly audible through the decay of autumn.

It was too dark on the other side to detect any traces of a recent human presence in the thicket.  He couldn’t quiet, however, the feeling that he had had a glimpse of a woman clothed in black who had studied him secretly across the stagnant stretch of the lake.

On the other hand, there was no logic in a woman’s presence here at such an hour, no logic in a stranger’s running away from him.  While he pondered the night invaded the forest completely, making it impossible for him to search farther.  It had grown so dark, indeed, that he found his way out with difficulty.  The branches caught at his clothing.  The underbrush tangled itself about his feet.  It was as if the thicket were trying to hold him away from the house.