Five minutes passed—­ten minutes.  Then a tug with two barges went up stream.  The attitudes of the men upon these were the attitudes of those who see nothing remarkable in earth, water, or sky.  Clearly the whole affair had passed out of sight of the river.  Probably the hunt had gone into the beech woods behind the house.

“Confound it!” said Bailey.  “To be continued again, and no chance this time of the sequel.  But this is hard on a sick man.”

He heard a step on the staircase behind him and looking round saw the door open.  Mrs Green came in and sat down, panting.  She still had her bonnet on, her purse in her hand, and her little brown basket upon her arm.  “Oh, there!” she said, and left Bailey to imagine the rest.

“Have a little whisky and water, Mrs Green, and tell me about it,” said Bailey.

Sipping a little, the lady began to recover her powers of explanation.

One of those black creatures at the Fitzgibbon’s had gone mad, and was running about with a big knife, stabbing people.  He had killed a groom, and stabbed the under-butler, and almost cut the arm off a boating gentleman.

“Running amuck with a krees,” said Bailey.  “I thought that was it.”

And he was hiding in the wood when she came through it from the town.

“What!  Did he run after you?” asked Bailey, with a certain touch of glee in his voice.

“No, that was the horrible part of it,” Mrs Green explained.  She had been right through the woods and had never known he was there.  It was only when she met young Mr Fitzgibbon carrying his gun in the shrubbery that she heard anything about it.  Apparently, what upset Mrs Green was the lost opportunity for emotion.  She was determined, however, to make the most of what was left her.

“To think he was there all the time!” she said, over and over again.

Bailey endured this patiently enough for perhaps ten minutes.  At last he thought it advisable to assert himself.  “It’s twenty past one, Mrs Green,” he said.  “Don’t you think it time you got me something to eat?”

This brought Mrs Green suddenly to her knees.

“Oh Lord, sir!” she said.  “Oh! don’t go making me go out of this room, sir, till I know he’s caught.  He might have got into the house, sir.  He might be creeping, creeping, with that knife of his, along the passage this very—­”

She broke off suddenly and glared over him at the window.  Her lower jaw dropped.  Bailey turned his head sharply.

For the space of half a second things seemed just as they were.  There was the tree, the balcony, the shining river, the distant church tower.  Then he noticed that the acacia was displaced about a foot to the right, and that it was quivering, and the leaves were rustling.  The tree was shaken violently, and a heavy panting was audible.