The poachers crept out grinning, and watched the keepers’ progress along the hill-face, till they disappeared into the Maxwell woods.

“Ee be sold again—­blast ’im!” said Hurd, with a note of quite disproportionate exultation in his queer, cracked voice.  “Now I’ll set them snares.  But you’d better git home.”

Patton took the hint, gave a grunt of thanks as his companion handed him two rabbits, which he stowed away in the capacious pockets of his poacher’s coat, and slouched off home by as sheltered and roundabout a way as possible.

Hurd, left to himself, stowed his nets and other apparatus in a hidden crevice of the bank, and strolled along to set his snares in three hare-runs, well known to him, round the further side of the wood.

Then he waited impatiently for the striking of the clock in Mellor church.  The cold was bitter, but his night’s work was not over yet, and he had had very good reasons for getting rid of Patton.

Almost immediately the bell rang out, the echo rolling round the bend of the hills in the frosty silence.  Half-past twelve Hurd scrambled over the ditch, pushed his way through the dilapidated hedge, and began to climb the ascent of the wood.  The outskirts of it were filled with a thin mixed growth of sapling and underwood, but the high centre of it was crowned by a grove of full-grown beeches, through which the moon, now at its height, was playing freely, as Hurd clambered upwards amid the dead leaves just freshly strewn, as though in yearly festival, about their polished trunks.  Such infinite grace and strength in the line work of the branches!—­branches not bent into gnarled and unexpected fantasies, like those of the oak, but gathered into every conceivable harmony of upward curve and sweep, rising all together, black against the silvery light, each tree related to and completing its neighbour, as though the whole wood, so finely rounded on itself and to the hill, were but one majestic conception of a master artist.

But Hurd saw nothing of this as he plunged through the leaves.  He was thinking that it was extremely likely a man would be on the look-out for him to-night under the big beeches—­a man with some business to propose to him.  A few words dropped in his ear at a certain public-house the night before had seemed to him to mean this, and he had accordingly sent Patton out of the way.

But when he got to the top of the hill no one was to be seen or heard, and he sat him down on a fallen log to smoke and wait awhile.

He had no sooner, however, taken his seat than he shifted it uneasily, turning himself round so as to look in the other direction.  For in front of him, as he was first placed, there was a gap in the trees, and over the lower wood, plainly visible and challenging attention, rose the dark mass of Mellor House.  And the sight of Mellor suggested reflections just now that were not particularly agreeable to Jim Hurd.