At noon on a certain Thursday, seven days after his arrival, the Duke of Dorset set out to shoot quail in the river bottom south of the chÂteau. A shower of rain had fallen in the morning. The air was clear and bright. The mountains gleamed as in a mirror, the haze, by some optical illusion, banked behind them. The vigor of spring, by some trick of Nature, seemed to have crept back into the earth; to swim in the dark waters of the river; to lie at the root of the grasses; to swell under the bark of the fir tree, waiting for a day or two of sun. The great principle of life, waning in the autumn, seemed moving, potent, on the point of recovering its vitality, as under some April shower. Birds fluttered in the thickets, as though seized with a nesting instinct; the cattle wandered in their pasture; new blades started green at the roots of the brown turf; and, now and then, as though misled, as though tricked, a little flower opened to the sun.

The man, walking through the fields, the meadows, over the moist leaves, received, like every other thing, his share of this subtle influence. The clean air whipped his blood; that virility, warming in the grasses, in the green stem of the flower, under the bark of the fir tree, warmed, too, in every fiber of his body.

He walked on, following the high bank of the river, forgetting the red setter at his heels, the gun tucked under his arm. Quail got up and whirred to distant thickets, the woodcock arose from some corner of the swamp, but the gun remained under the cover of his arm. He felt somehow, on this afternoon, a certain sympathy with these little people of the fields—with the robin and his brown lady. Under what principle of selection had they mated? What trick of manner had favored this dapper gallant? What thing of special beauty had set this thicket belle, in his eye, above her rivals? The riddle, as he turned it, lifted to a broader application.

Was not that mystery a thing hidden as no other mystery moving in this world is hidden? When the King Cophetua caught up the beggar maid for queen, could he give a reason for it? Was it the blue eye that did it, or the red mouth? Other eyes were blue, other mouths, in his court, were red. Did he know any better what it was than this brown fellow in his tree top? Did one ever know? Did any living thing, since the world began its spinning, know?

Imperceptibly, creeping like some opiate, the mystery of it occupied the Duke's fancy. He returned to the picture on the stair; to the girl in Oban. What was it that his blood had caught? What thing was it that set this woman above every other in the world? Why was it that the mere memory of her voice set the nerves under his skin to tingling? Why was it that a hunger for her spread through him, as though every fiber had a mouth that starved? Had he stood up to be shot against a wall, there, in the sun, he could not have answered.

He traveled for miles south along the river, in this autumn afternoon, idly, his gun under his arm, until the trail ended at the bend of the river, where the black waters swing about a moment, before plunging over a mile of rapids seaward through the mountains. Here the red Indian, whose trail he followed, used once to cross, swimming with a long stroke of his right arm, and holding his weapon over his head that the bowstring might be dry. A fir, uprooted by the winds, lay with its top buried in the pool, its brown body warm, mottled with the sun.

The Duke of Dorset sat down on this tree, his back against a limb. And Nature, that great enchantress, that subtle guardian of life, that divine fakir, squatting on her carpet in the sun, tempted him with pictures of vivid, intoxicating detail; whispered and suggested, stretching her lures, cunning as a spider, across the door posts of every sense. The leaves, falling on his face, were soft hands that touched him, the birds, laughing in the thickets, were a human voice that laughed, the rustle of their wings were skirts trailing on a carpet.

The day waned. The sun grew thinner northward on the fields. The blue haze gathered in the pockets of the mountains, as though, like smoke, it seeped upward through the earth. A cooler air attended. An owl, sleeping in the green top of a fir tree across the river, troubled by some dream, lurched forward, lost his footing on the brown limb, awoke, and flapped, without a sound, eastward to a thicker tree top. The Duke of Dorset, sitting with the gun across his knees, caught the shadow traveling on the water, turned where he sat, and brought the gun up to his shoulder. A moment the blue barrels followed the outlaw, then his finger pressed the trigger, and that pirate had gone out no more on his robbing raids, but fate, moving to another purpose, saved him; the gun snapped; the Duke's finger instantly caught the second trigger, but that snapped, like the first, with a faint click. He brought the gun down, threw open the breech, and replaced the cartridges, but the outlaw was housed now safely in his distant tree top. The Duke of Dorset got down from his place, and turned the gun on a patch of lichen, set like a silver target against a black rock emerging from the river, but the triggers clicked again.

He broke the gun and looked carefully at the shells. There was no dent on the caps, one was wholly untouched, the other scratched faintly. He opened and closed the breech slowly to observe if the cocking mechanism were defective. The resistance, the sobbing cluck of it, showed no difficulty there. Then he drew out the shells and raised the gun butt so the strikers would fall forward, but they did not fall into sight. He struck the butt with his hand to loosen these pins, if they were sticking, but they remained even with the face of the breech action. He sprung the hammers on the strikers and still they came no farther into the breech. The difficulty was obscure, the strikers were loose in their beds, the hammers working, the gun had been perfect until to-day. He began to examine the nose of the strikers, and the explanation showed on the hard steel; both had been filed off smooth with the face of the breech action. The ends of the strikers were blunt and square. He could easily see the mark of the file on each one of them. The gun was useless. The discovery was so extraordinary that the man did not seek a theory to fit it. It was useless to speculate. He would inquire of the servant on his return.

The Duke followed the river to the park east of the chÂteau. Here the road crossed on a single stone span rising gracefully over the black water. A low wall, no higher than a man's knee, inclosed the road over the long arch. Beyond was the forest, changing under the descending light from blue to purple, from purple into blackness—all forest, from the bridge end to the distant tree-laced sky line. Westward the park lifted to the chÂteau—a park like those to be found in England; forest trees standing in no order, the undergrowth removed, and the earth carpeted with grass. At the summit, to be seen in among the gray tree tops, the dull yellow walls of the chÂteau loomed. The river, caught here in a narrow channel, boiled and roared, as though maddened by the insolence of that arch lifted over it for the human foot.

As the Duke approached he saw two men standing in the border of the forest beyond this bridge, talking together; a moment later one crossed the bridge and climbed the park to the chÂteau. The Duke, coming up the trail, observed that this man was a footman, in the livery of the house. The other, who remained by the roadside, looking after him, was the idle Japanese. He watched the footman until he disappeared among the trees, then he turned into the forest, a moment before the Duke of Dorset came up by the corner of the bridge into the park.

The incident recalled to the Duke his previous knowledge of this Japanese and with it an explanation. The man was, doubtless, a relative of some servant in the house; the father, perhaps the uncle, of this footman, and he came here for the flotsam about a country house which the footman could dispose of. It was a custom old as the oriental servant; there was always the family to benefit by the servant's fortune, and one going between surreptitiously with his basket. The incident and the explanation of it passed through the man's mind like any casual observation—as one notes and sees the reason of a hundred trivial matters, without comment, in a day.

The Duke crossed the road and turned up the hill through the park. The sun was gone now, and a hundred lights peeped through the trees, blinking from the windows of the house, as though all of its apartments were in use. At the door, as he was about to speak of the disabled gun, a valet attending brought him a message that swept so trivial an incident wholly out of his mind. Miss Childers and the party had returned. Would His Grace dress a little earlier for dinner.

The Duke of Dorset had been waiting for these words, endless day after day, and yet, now that they were spoken, he felt like one taken wholly by surprise; like one called out of his bed to face some difficult emergency, for which he needed time.