“That was a promise, I think, and I keep the pledge of it,” he said, and with a smile put the cluster of white seed-tufts and green leaves into one of the pockets of his shooting jacket.

“Oh, don’t tie me down!” said Marcella, laughing, but flushing also.  “And don’t you think, Mr. Raeburn, that you might open that gate?  At least, we can’t get the scissors and the wire unless you do.”

CHAPTER V.

The autumn evening was far advanced when Aldous Raeburn, after his day’s shooting, passed again by the gates of Mellor Park on his road home.  He glanced up the ill-kept drive, with its fine overhanging limes, caught a glimpse to the left of the little church, and to the right, of the long eastern front of the house; lingered a moment to watch the sunset light streaming through the level branches of two distant cedars, standing black and sharp against the fiery west, and then walked briskly forwards in the mood of a man going as fast as may be to an appointment he both desires and dreads.

He had given his gun to the keeper, who had already sped far ahead of him, in the shooting-cart which his master had declined.  His dog, a black retriever, was at his heels, and both dog and man were somewhat weary and stiff with exercise.  But for the privilege of solitude, Aldous Raeburn would at that moment have faced a good deal more than the two miles of extra walking which now lay between him and Maxwell Court.

About him, as he trudged on, lay a beautiful world of English woodland.  After he had passed through the hamlet of Mellor, with its three-cornered piece of open common, and its patches of arable—­representing the original forest-clearing made centuries ago by the primitive fathers of the village in this corner of the Chiltern uplands—­the beech woods closed thickly round him.  Beech woods of all kinds—­from forest slopes, where majestic trees, grey and soaring pillars of the woodland roof, stood in stately isolation on the dead-leaf carpet woven by the years about their carved and polished bases, to the close plantations of young trees, where the saplings crowded on each other, and here and there amid the airless tangle of leaf and branch some long pheasant-drive, cut straight through the green heart of the wood, refreshed the seeking eye with its arched and far-receding path.  Two or three times on his walk Aldous heard from far within the trees the sounds of hatchet and turner’s wheel, which told him he was passing one of the wood-cutter’s huts that in the hilly parts of this district supply the first simple steps of the chairmaking industry, carried on in the little factory towns of the more populous valleys.  And two or three times also he passed a string of the great timber carts which haunt the Chiltern lanes; the patient team of brown horses straining at the weight behind them, the vast prostrate trunks rattling in their chains, and the smoke from the carters’ pipes rising slowly into the damp sunset air.  But for the most part the road along which he walked was utterly forsaken of human kind.  Nor were there any signs of habitation—­no cottages, no farms.  He was scarcely more than thirty miles from London; yet in this solemn evening glow it would have been hardly possible to find a remoter, lonelier nature than that through which he was passing.