“Perhaps it has; but it happens that I have thought more of exercise lately, and have taken walks late in the evening, besides playing my old gymnastic tricks every day.”

They talked on many subjects, but through all he said Helen perceived a pervading tone of sadness, and an expression as of a dreamy foreboding of unknown evil.  They parted at the usual hour, and went to their several rooms.  The sadness of Mr. Bernard had sunk into the heart of Helen, and she mingled many tears with her prayers that evening, earnestly entreating that he might be comforted in his days of trial and protected in his hour of danger.

Mr. Bernard stayed in his room a short time before setting out for his evening walk.  His eye fell upon the Bible his mother had given him when he left home, and he opened it in the New Testament at a venture.  It happened that the first words he read were these,—­“Lest, coming suddenly, he find you sleeping.”  In the state of mind in which he was at the moment, the text startled him.  It was like a supernatural warning.  He was not going to expose himself to any particular danger this evening; a walk in a quiet village was as free from risk as Helen Darley or his own mother could ask; yet he had an unaccountable feeling of apprehension, without any definite object.  At this moment he remembered the old Doctor’s counsel, which he had sometimes neglected, and, blushing at the feeling which led him to do it, he took the pistol his suspicious old friend had forced upon him, which he had put away loaded, and, thrusting it into his pocket, set out upon his walk.

The moon was shining at intervals, for the night was partially clouded.  There seemed to be nobody stirring, though his attention was unusually awake, and he could hear the whirr of the bats overhead, and the pulsating croak of the frogs in the distant pools and marshes.  Presently he detected the sound of hoofs at some distance, and, looking forward, saw a horseman coming in his direction.  The moon was under a cloud at the moment, and he could only observe that the horse and his rider looked like a single dark object, and that they were moving along at an easy pace.  Mr. Bernard was really ashamed of himself, when he found his hand on the butt of his pistol.  When the horseman was within a hundred and fifty yards of him, the moon shone out suddenly and revealed each of them to the other.  The rider paused for a moment, as if carefully surveying the pedestrian, then suddenly put his horse to the full gallop, and dashed towards him, rising at the same instant in his stirrups and swinging something round his head,—­what, Mr. Bernard could not make out.  It was a strange manoeuvre,—­so strange and threatening in aspect that the young man forgot his nervousness in an instant, cocked his pistol, and waited to see what mischief all this meant.  He did not wait long.  As the rider came rushing towards him, he made a rapid motion and something leaped five-and-twenty feet through