Mavis at once became angry and suspicious again, and she went to her husband to report this act of rebellion.  The office was empty, but she found him at the yard.  He was in his shirt-sleeves, sitting on a corn-bin, and he seemed to be greatly troubled by what she told him that she wished him to do.  She asked him to go into the wood himself and spy out Norah quietly, and see if she was really alone there.

“Oh, I don’t much like this job, Mav.  Besides, it’s to hunt for a needle in a bundle of hay.  How do I know which way the lass has gone?”

“I’m telling you she went in at the second path.  She won’t have gone far.  Probably you’ll come upon her this side of the rides—­along by the stream, very likely.”

But Dale still showed reluctance to undertake the detective mission.

“Then I must go,” said Mavis.  “I can’t put up with this sort of thing, and I mean to stop it.  She must be made to understand once for all—­”

“Very well,” said Dale; and he got off the corn-bin and picked up his jacket.

“She’ll pay more heed to you than she would to me.  But, one word, Will.  If you catch her with a young man don’t go and lose your temper with him.  Don’t bother about him.  Just bring the young minx straight home.”

“An’ suppose there’s no young man.”

“Bring her back just the same, and lecture her all the way on her disobedience—­and the trouble and annoyance she is giving us.  Tell her we’re not going to stand any more of it.”

“Very well.”

He walked along the road at a fairly brisk pace until he came to the second stile, and then he stood hesitatingly.  The firs grew thick here, and the shadows that they cast were dark and opaque, encroaching on the pathway, making it a narrow strip of dim light that would lead one into the mysterious and gloomy depths of the wood.

He crossed the stile, and went along the path very slowly, pausing now and then to listen.  There was not a sound; the whole wood was as silent as the grave.

Presently the fir-trees on each side of him opened out a little, and here and there beeches and ashes appeared; then the path passed through a glade, the shadows receded, and he had a sensation of being more free and able to breathe better.  If he kept on by the path he would soon come to the main ride, that long widely cut avenue which goes close to Kibworth Rocks and gives access to the other straight cuts leading to the Abbey park.  He left the path and struck across through the trees, making a line that would take him soon to the wildest part of the ancient Chase, and that, if he pursued it far enough, would eventually bring him out on the big ride near the rocks.

The dark stiff firs gave place to solemnly magnificent beeches; glade succeeded glade; thickets of holly and hawthorn dense as a savage jungle tried to baffle one’s approach to lawnlike spaces where the grass grew finely as in a garden, and the white stems of the high trees looked like pillars of a splendid church; the stream ran silently and secretly, not flashing when it swept out under the sky, or murmuring when it slid down tiny cascades beneath the branches.