would shut his eyes and run by it, nor draw breath until he reached the lodge, down the road; that quite a number of Christian folk who had been used to envy my father the snuggest little retreat within twenty miles would now have refused a hundred pounds to spend one night in it.  So it was, however; and the chance of an “out"-bidder might be passed over as negligible.  On the other hand, Miss Belcher had offered Messrs. Harding and Whiteway a handsome and more than sufficient price for the property.  She wanted it to round off her estate, out of which, at present, it cut a small cantle and at an awkward corner.  Moreover, if Miss Belcher had not come forward, Plinny was prepared to purchase.  That Miss Belcher would acquire the place no one doubted.  Still, a public sale it had to be.

Early in the afternoon of the 5th, she left us for Plymouth, to make arrangements for the bidding.  I did not see her depart, having been occupied since five in the morning in a glorious otter-hunt, for which Mr. Rogers had brought over his hounds.  The heat of the day found us far up-stream, and a good ten miles from home; and by the time Mr. Rogers had returned his pack to Miss Belcher’s hospitable kennels the sun was low in the west.  I know nothing that will make a man more honestly dirty than a long otter-hunt, followed by a perspiring tramp along a dusty road.  From feet to waist I was a cake of dried mud overlaid with dust.  I had dust in my hair, in the creases of my clothes, in the pores of my skin.  I needed ablution far beyond the resources of Miss Belcher’s establishment, which, to tell the truth, left a good deal to seek in the apparatus of personal cleanliness; and, snatching up the clean shirt and suit of clothes which the ever-provident Plinny had laid out on the bed for me, I ran down across the park to the stream under the plantation.

Little rain had fallen for a month past, and, arriving at the pool on which I had counted for a bath, I found it almost dry.  While I stood there, in two minds whether to return or to strip and make the best of it, I bethought me that—­although I had never bathed there in my life, the stream would be better worth trying where it ran through the now deserted garden of Minden Cottage, below the summer-house.  The bottom might be muddy, but the dam which my father had built there secured a sufficiency of water in the hottest months.  I picked up my clothes again, and, following the stream up to the little door in the garden wall, pushed open the rusty latch, and entered the garden.

The hour, as I have said, was drawing on to dusk; and though, perhaps I ought to say, I am by nature not inclined to nervousness (or I had not ventured so near that particular spot), yet scared enough I was, as I stepped on to the little foot-bridge, to see a man standing by the doorway of the summer-house.

For an instant a terror seized me that it might be a ghost—­or, worse, the man himself, Aaron Glass.  But a second glance, as I halted on a hair-trigger—­so to speak—­to turn and run for my life, assured me that the man was a stranger.