Trix was walking over the moorland. The Duchessa and Miss Tibbutt had departed to what promised to be an exceedingly dull garden party some five miles distant. It had been decreed that it was entirely unnecessary to inflict the same probable dulness on Trix, therefore she had been left to freedom and her own devices for the afternoon.

Trix was playing the game of “I remember.” It can be a quite extraordinarily fascinating game, or an exceedingly painful one. Trix was finding it extraordinarily fascinating. It was so gorgeously delightful to find that nothing had shrunk, nothing lessened in beauty or mystery. A larch copse was every bit as much a haunt of the Little People as formerly; the moss every bit as much a cool green carpet for their tripping feet. A few belated foxglove stems added to the old-time enchantment of the place. Even a little stream rippling through the wood, was a veritable stream, and not merely a watery ditch, as it might quite well have proved. Then there was the view from the gate, through a frame of beech trees out towards the sea. It was still as entrancing an ocean, sun-flecked and radiant. There were still as infinite possibilities in the unknown Beyond, could one have chartered a white-winged boat, and have sailed to where land and water meet. There was a pond, too, surrounded by blackberry bushes and great spear-like rushes, perhaps not quite the enormous lake of one’s childhood, but a reasonably large pond enough, and there were still the blackberry bushes and the spear-like rushes. And, finally, there was the moorland, glowing with more radiant crimson lakes and madders than the most wonderful paint box ever held, and stretching up and down, and up again, till it melted in far away purples and lavenders.

Trix’s heart sang in accord with the laughing sun-kissed earth around her. It was all so gorgeous, so free and untrammelled. She lay upon the hot springy heather, and crushed the tiny purple flowers of the wild thyme between her fingers, raising the bruised petals to her face to drink in their strong sweet scent.

From far off she could hear the tinkle of a goat bell, and the occasional short bark of a sheep dog. All else was silence, save for the humming of the bees above the heather. Tiny insects floated in the still air, looking like specks of thistle-down as the sun caught and silvered their minute wings. Little blue butterflies flitted hither and thither like radiant animated flowers.

For a long time Trix sat very still, body and soul bathed in the beauty around her. At last she got to her feet, and made her way across the heather, ignoring the small beaten tracks despite the prickliness of her chosen route.

After some half-hour’s walking she came to a stone wall bordering a hilly field, a low wall, a battered wall, where tiny ferns grew in the crevices, and the stones themselves were patched with orange-coloured lichen.

Trix climbed the wall, and walked across the soft grass. A good way to the right was a fence, and beyond the fence a wood. Trix made her way slowly towards it. Thistles grew among the grass,—carding thistles, and thistles with small drooping heads. She looked at them idly as she walked. Suddenly a slight sound behind her made her turn, and with the turning her heart leapt to her throat.

From over the brow of the hilly field behind her, quite a number of cattle were coming at a fair pace towards her.

Now Trix hated cows in any shape or form, and these were the unpleasant white-faced, brown cattle, whose very appearance is against them. They were moving quickly too, quite alarmingly quickly.

Trix cast one terrified and pathetic glance over her shoulder. The glance was all-sufficient. She ran,—ran straight for the wood, the cattle after her. Doubtless curiosity, mere enquiry maybe, prompted their pursuit. Trix concerned herself not at all with the motive, the fact was all-sufficient. Fear lent wings to her feet, and with the horned and horrid beasts still some ten yards behind her, she precipitated herself across the fence to fall in an undignified but wholly relieved heap among a mass of bracken and whortleberry bushes. The briefest of moments saw her once more on her feet, struggling, fighting her way through shoulder-high bracken. Five minutes brought her to an open space beyond. Trembling, breathless, and most suspiciously near tears, she sank upon the ground.

“The beasts!” ejaculated Trix opprobriously, and not as the mere statement of an obvious fact. She took off her hat, which flight had flung to a somewhat rakish angle, and blinked vigorously towards the trees. She was not going to cry.

Presently fright gave place to interest. She gazed around, curious, speculative. It was an unusual wood, a strange wood, a wood of holly trees, with a scattered sprinkling of beech trees. The grey twisted trunks of the hollies gleamed among the dark foliage, giving an eerie and almost uncanny atmosphere to the place. It was extraordinarily silent, too; and infinitely lonelier than the deserted moorland. It gave Trix an odd feeling of unpleasant mystery. Yet there was nothing for it but to face the mystery, to see if she could not find some way out further adown the wood. Not for untold gold would she again have faced those horned beasts behind her.

A tiny narrow path led downhill from the cleared space. Trix set off down it, swinging her hat airily by the brim the while. Presently the sense of uncanniness abated somewhat; the elfin in her went out to meet the weirdness of the wood.

Now and again she stopped to pick and eat whortleberries from the massed bushes beneath the trees. She did not particularly like them, truly; nevertheless she was still young enough to pick and eat what nature had provided for picking and eating, and that for the mere pleasure of being able to do so. Also, at this juncture the action brought confidence in its train.

Presently, through the trees facing her, she saw a wall, a high wall, a brick wall, and quite evidently bordering civilization.

“It can’t go on for ever,” considered Trix. “It must come to an end some time, either right, or left. And I’m not going back.” This last exceedingly firmly.

She went forward, scrutinizing, anxious. And then,—joyful and welcome sight!—a door, an open door came into view. A mound of half-carted leaf mould just without showed, to any one endowed with even the meanest powers of deduction, that someone—some man, probably—was busy in the neighbourhood.

Trix made hastily for the door. The next moment she was through it, to find herself face to face with a man and a wheelbarrow. Trix came to a standstill, a standstill at once sudden and unpremeditated. The man dropped the wheelbarrow. They stared blankly at each other. And Trix was far too flustered to realize that his stare was infinitely more amazed than her own.

“You can’t come through this way,” said the man, decisive though bewildered. His orders regarding the non-entrance of strangers had been of the emphatic kind.

Trix’s brain worked rapidly. The route before her must lead to safety, and nothing, no power on earth, would take her back through the field atop the wood. She was genuinely, quite genuinely too frightened. This is by way of excuse, since here a regrettable fact must be recorded. Trix gave vent to a sound closely resembling a sneeze. It was followed by one brief sentence.

“There’s someone at the gate,” was what the man heard.

Again amazement was written on his face. He turned towards the gate. Trix fled past him.

“I couldn’t go back,” she insisted to herself, as she vanished round the corner of a big green-house. “And I did say ‘isn’t there’ even if it was mixed up with a sneeze. And wherever have I seen that man’s face before?”

She whisked round another corner of the green-house, attempting no answer to her query at the moment, ran down a long cinder path bordered by cabbages and gooseberry bushes, and bolted through another door in another wall. And here Trix found herself in an orchard, at the bottom of which was a yew hedge wherein she espied a wicket gate. She made rapid way towards it. And now she saw a big grey house facing her. There was no mistaking it. Childhood’s memories rushed upon her. It was Chorley Old Hall.

Trix came through the wicket gate, and out upon a lawn, in the middle of which was a great marble basin full of crystal water, from which rose a little silver fountain. Before her was the big grey house, melancholy, deserted-looking. The blinds were drawn down in most of the windows. It had the appearance of a house in which death was present.

And then a spirit of curiosity fell upon her, a sudden strong desire to see within the house, to go once more into the rooms where she had stood in the old days, a small and somewhat frightened child.

There was not a soul in sight. Probably the man with the wheelbarrow had not thought it worth while to pursue her. The garden appeared as deserted as the house. Trix tip-toed cautiously towards it. She looked like a kitten or a canary approaching a dead elephant.

To her left was a door. Quite probably it was locked; but then, by the favour of fortune, it might not be. Of course she ran a risk, a considerable risk of meeting some caretaker or other, and her presence would not be particularly easy to explain. Curiosity and prudence wavered momentarily in the balance. Curiosity turned the scale. She tried the door. Vastly to her delight it yielded at her push. She slipped inside the house, closing it softly behind her.

She found herself in a long carpeted passage, sporting prints adorning the walls. She tip-toed down it, her step making no smallest sound on the soft carpet. The end of the passage brought her into a big square hall. To her right were wide deep stairs; opposite them was a door, in all probability the front door; to her left was another door.

Trix recalled the past, rapidly, and in detail. The door to the left must lead to the library,—that is, if her memory did not play her false. She remembered the big room, the book-cases reaching from floor to ceiling, and the man with the black eyes, who had terrified her. Something, some fleeting shadow, of her old childish fear was upon her now, as she turned the door handle. The door yielded easily. She pushed it wide open.

The room was shadowed, gloomy almost. The heavy curtains were drawn back from the windows, but other curtains of some thinnish green material hung before them, curtains which effectually blotted out any view from the window, or view into the room from without. Before her were the old remembered book-cases, filled with dark, rather fusty books.

Trix pushed the door to behind her, and turned, nonchalantly, to look around the room. As she looked her heart jumped, leapt, and then stood still.