Slowly we toiled on up the picturesque little glen for nearly a mile and a half.  Its beauties were extraordinary, and the silence was unbroken save for the musical ripple of the water over the stones.  Hidden there in the center of that great wood, no one had visited it perhaps for years, not even the keepers, for no path led there, and by reason of the tangle of briars and bush it was utterly ungetatable.  Indeed, it had ruined our clothes to search there, and as we went on with so many windings and turns we became utterly out of our bearings.  We knew ourselves to be in the center of the wood, but that was all.

The sun had set, and the sky above showed the crimson of the distant afterglow, warning us that it was time we began to think of how to make our exit.  We were passing around a sharp bend in the glen where the boulders were so thickly moss-grown that our feet fell noiselessly, when I thought I heard a voice, and raising my hand we both halted suddenly.

“Someone is there,” I whispered quickly.  “Behind that rock.”  She nodded in the affirmative, for she, too, had heard the voice.

We listened, but the sound was not repeated.  That someone was on the other side of the rock I knew, for in a tree in the vicinity a thrush was hopping from twig to twig, sounding its alarm-cry and objecting to being disturbed.

Therefore we crept silently forward together to ascertain who were the intruders.  The only manner, however, in which to get a view beyond the huge rock that, having fallen across the stream centuries ago, had diverted its channel, was to clamber up its mossy sides to the summit.  This we did eagerly and breathlessly, without betraying our presence by the utterance of a single word.

To reach the side of the boulder we were compelled to walk through the shallow water, but Muriel, quite undaunted, sprang lithely along at my side, and with one accord we swarmed up the steep rock, gripping its slippery face with our hands and laying ourselves flat as we came to its summit.

Then together we peered over, just, however, in time to see two dark figures of men disappearing into the thicket on the opposite side of the glen.

“Who are they, I wonder?” I asked.  “Do you recognize them?”

“No.  They are entire strangers to me,” was her answer.  “But they seem fairly well dressed.  Perhaps two sportsmen from some shooting-party in the neighborhood.  They’ve lost their way most probably.”

“But I don’t think they carried guns,” I said.  “One of them had something over his shoulder?”

“Wasn’t it a gun?  I thought it was.”

“No, he wasn’t carrying it like he’d carry a gun.  It was short—­and seemed more like a spade.”

“A spade!” she gasped quickly in a low voice.  “A spade!  Are you certain of that?”

“No, not at all certain.  We only had an instantaneous glance of them.  We were unfortunately too late to see them face to face.”