have entered a strange world peopled only with dark phantoms and moving shadows and ghosts.  A voiceless solitude, too, save for the moaning of the wind that came sweeping in bitter blasts down from the rainy hills.  He did not recognize the features of this melancholy landscape; they had all changed since his last visit; nay, they were changing under his very eyes, as this or that far mountain-top receded behind a veil of gray, or a shadow of greater darkness advanced with stealthy tread along one of those lonely glens.  There was something threatening in the aspect of both earth and sky; something louring, conspiring, as if some dread fate were awaiting this intruding stranger; at times he fancied he could hear low-murmuring voices, the first mutterings of distant thunder.  What if some red bolt of lightning were suddenly to sever this blackness in twain and reveal its hidden and awful secrets?  But no; there was no such friendly or avenging glare; the brooding skies lay over the sombre valleys, and the gloomy phantasmagoria slowly changed and changed in that unearthly twilight, as the mists and the wind and the rain transformed the solid hills and the straths into intermingling vapors and visions.  A spectral world, unreal, and yet terrible; apparently voiceless and tenantless; and yet somehow suggesting that there were eyes watching, and vaguely moving and menacing shapes passing hither and thither before him in the gloom.

During these last few days he had been assuring himself that he would enter upon this second stalking expedition without any great tremor.  It was only on the first occasion, when everything was strange and unknown to him, that he was naturally nervous.  Even the keepers had declared that the shooting of the first stag was everything; that thereafter he would have confidence; that he would take the whole matter as coolly as themselves.  And yet, when they now began to proceed more warily (old Maggie having been hobbled some way back) and when every corrie and slope and plateau had to be searched with the glass, he found himself growing not a little anxious at the thought of drawing the trigger; insomuch, indeed, that those sombre fancies of the imagination went out of his head altogether and gave place to the apprehension that on such a day it would be difficult to make a good shot.  Their initial difficulty, however, was to find any trace of the “beasts.”  The wild weather had most likely driven them away from their usual haunts into some place of shelter, the smaller companies joining the main herd; at all events, up to lunch-time the stalkers had seen nothing.  It was during this brief rest—­in a deep peat-hag, down which trickled a little stream of rain-water—­that Lionel discovered two things:  first, that he was wet to the skin, and, second, that the wind in these altitudes was of an Arctic keenness.  So long as he had been kept going, he had not paid much attention; but now this bitter blast seemed to pierce him to the very marrow; and he began to think that these were very pleasant conditions for a professional singer to be in—­for a professional singer whose very existence depended on his voice.