A “spirit in her feet” impelled her.  She went back to the house, found a cloak and hat, put out the lamps, and sent the servants to bed.  Then noiselessly she once more undid the drawing-room door, and stole out into the garden and across the lawn.  Soon she was in the lime-walk, the first yellow leaves crackling beneath her feet; then in the kitchen garden, where the apples shone dimly on the laden boughs, where sunflowers and dahlias and marigolds, tall white daisies and late roses—­the ghosts of their daylight selves—­dreamed and drooped under the moon; where the bees slept and only great moths were abroad.  And so on to the climbing path and the hollows of the down.  She walked quickly along the edge of it, through hanging woods of beech that clothed the hill-side.  Sometimes the trees met in majestic darkness above her head, and the path was a glimmering mystery before her.  Sometimes the ground broke away on her left—­abruptly—­in great chasms, torn from the hill-side, stripped of trees, and open to the stars.  Down rushed the steep slopes to the plain, clad in the decaying leaf and mast of former years, and at the edges of these precipitous glades, or scattered at long intervals across them, great single trees emerged, the types and masters of the forest, their trunks, incomparably tall, and all their noble limbs, now thinly veiled by a departing leafage, drawn sharp, in black and silver, on the pale background of the chalk plain.  Nothing so grandiose as these climbing beech woods of middle England!—­by day, as it were, some vast procession marching joyously over hill and dale to the music of the birds and the wind; and at night, a brooding host, silent yet animate, waiting the signal of the dawn.

Diana passed through them, drinking in the exaltation of their silence and their strength, yet driven on by the mere weakness and foolishness of love.  By following the curve of the down she could reach a point on the hill-side whence, on a rising ground to the north, Tallyn was visible.  She hastened thither through the night.  Once she was startled by a shot fired from a plantation near the path, trees began to rustle and dogs to bark, and she fled on, in terror lest the Tallyn keepers might discover her.  Alack!—­for whose pleasure were they watching now?

The trees fell back.  She reached the bare shoulder of the down.  Northward and eastward spread the plain; and on the low hill in front her eyes discerned the pale patch of Tallyn, flanked by the darkness of the woods.  And in that dim front, a light—­surely a light?—­in an upper window.  She sank down in a hollow of the chalk, her eyes upon the house, murmuring and weeping.