And with that they plunged down the hillside into the valley, Mr. Skale leading the way at a terrific pace, shouting out instructions and warnings from time to time that echoed from the rocks as though voices followed them down from the mountains.  The darkness swallowed them, they left the wind behind; the silence that dwells in the folded hills fell about their steps; the air grew less keen; the trees multiplied, gathering them in with fingers of mist and shadow.  Only the clatter of their boots on the rocky path, and the heavy bass of the clergyman’s voice shouting instructions from time to time, broke the stillness.  Spinrobin followed the big dark outline in front of him as best he could, stumbling frequently.  With countless little hopping steps he dodged along from point to point, a certain lucky nimbleness in his twinkling feet saving him from many a tumble.

“All right behind there?” Mr. Skale would thunder.

“All right, thanks, Mr. Skale,” he would reply in his thin tenor, “I’m coming.”

“Come along, then!” And on they would go faster than before, till in due course they emerged from the encircling woods and reached the more open ground about the house.  Somehow, in the jostling relations of the walk, a freedom of intercourse had been established that no amount of formal talk between four walls could have accomplished.  They scraped their dirty boots vigorously on the iron mat.

“Tired?” asked the clergyman, kindly.

“Winded, Mr. Skale, thank you—­nothing more,” was the reply.  He looked up at the square mass of the house looming dark against the sky, and the noise his companion made opening the door—­the actual rattle of the iron knob did it—­suddenly brought to him a clear realization of two things:  First, he understood that the whole way from the station Mr. Skale had been watching him closely, weighing, testing, proving him, though by ways and methods so subtle that they had escaped his observation at the time; secondly, that he was already so caught in the network of this personality, vaster and more powerful than his own, that escape if he desired it would be exceedingly difficult.  Like a man in a boat upon the upper Niagara river, he already felt the tug and suction of the current below—­the lust of a great adventure drawing him forward.  Mr. Skale’s hand upon his shoulder as they entered the house was the symbol of that.  The noise of the door closing behind him was the passing of the last bit of quiet water across which a landing to the bank might still have been possible.

Faint streamers from the dark, inscrutable house of fear reached him even then and left their vague, undecipherable signatures upon the surface of his soul.  The forces that vibrated so strangely in the atmosphere of Mr. Skale were already playing about his own person, gathering him in like a garment.  Yet while he shuddered, he liked it.  Was he not already losing something of his own insignificant and diminutive self?