About ten o’clock on the night of the ball at Beechmark, a labourer was crossing the park on his way home from his allotment.  Thanks to summertime and shortened hours of labour he had been able to get his winter greens in, and to earth up his potatoes, all in two strenuous evenings; and he was sauntering home dead-tired.  But he had doubled his wages since the outbreak of war and his fighting son had come back to him safe, so that on the whole he was inclined to think that the old country was worth living in!  The park he was traversing was mostly open pasture studded with trees, except where at the beginning of the eighteenth century the Lord Buntingford of the day had planted a wood of oak and beech about the small lake which he had made by the diversion of two streamlets that had once found a sluggish course through the grassland.  The trees in it were among the finest in the country, but like so much of English woodland before the war, they had been badly neglected for many years.  The trees blown down by winter storms had lain year after year where they fell; the dead undergrowth was choking the young saplings; and some of the paths through the wood had practically disappeared.

The path from the allotments to the village passed at the back of the wood.  Branching off from it, an old path leading through the trees and round the edge of the lake had once been frequently used as a short cut from the village to the house, but was now badly grown up and indeed superseded by the new drive from the western lodge, made some twenty years before this date.

The labourer, Richard Stimson, was therefore vaguely surprised when he turned the corner of the wood and reached the fork of the path, to see a figure of a woman, on the old right-of-way, between him and the wood, for which she seemed to be making.

It was not the figure of anyone he knew.  It was a lady, apparently, in a dark gown, and a small hat with a veil.  The light was still good, and he saw her clearly.  He stopped indeed to watch her, puzzled to know what a stranger could be doing in the park, and on that path at ten o’clock at night.  He was aware indeed that there were gay doings at Beechmark.  He had seen the illuminated garden and house from the upper park, and had caught occasional gusts of music from the band to which no doubt the quality were dancing.  But the fact didn’t seem to have much to do with the person he was staring at.

And while he stared at her, she turned, and instantly perceived—­he thought—­that she was observed.  She paused a moment, and then made an abrupt change of direction; running round the corner of the wood, she reached the path along which he himself had just come and disappeared from view.

The whole occurrence filliped the rustic mind; but before he reached his own cottage, Stimson had hit on an explanation which satisfied him.  It was of course a stranger who had lost her way across the park, mistaking the two paths.  On seeing him, she had realized that she was wrong and had quickly set herself right.  He told his wife the tale before he went to sleep, with this commentary; and they neither of them troubled to think about it any more.