The wood was very dark.  He groped his way through it with difficulty and found the hut.  Once inside it, he fastened the door with a wooden bar he had himself made, and turned on his electric torch.  Bit by bit in the course of his night visits he had accumulated a few necessary stores—­some firewood, a few groceries hidden in a corner, a couple of brown blankets, and a small box of tools.  A heap of dried bracken in a corner, raised on a substratum of old sacks, had often served him for a bed; and when he had kindled a wood fire in the rough grate of loose bricks where Colonel Shepherd’s keepers had been accustomed to warm the hot meat stews sent up for the shooting luncheons, and had set out his supper on the upturned fragment of an old box which had once held meal for pheasants, he had provided at least what was necessary for his night sojourn.  This food he had brought with him; a thermos bottle full of hot coffee, with slices of ham, cheese, and bread; and he ate it with appetite, sitting on a log beside the fire, and pleasantly conscious as he looked round him, like the Greek poet of long ago, of that “cuteness” of men which conjures up housing, food, and fire in earth’s loneliest places.  Outside that small firelit space lay the sheer silence of the wood, broken once or twice by the call and flight of an owl past the one carefully darkened window of the hut, or by the mysterious sighing and shuddering which, from time to time, would run through the crowded stems and leafless branches.

A queer “hotel” this, for mid-November!  He might, if he had chosen, have been amusing himself, tant bien que mal, in one or other of those shabby haunts,—­bars, night-clubs, dancing-rooms, to which his poverty and his moeurs condemned him, while his old comrades, the lads he had been brought up with at school and college, guardsmen, Hussars, and the rest, were holding high revel for the Peace at the Ritz or the Carlton; he might even, as far as money was concerned, now that he had bagged his great haul from Rachel, have been supping himself at the Ritz, if he had only had time to exchange his brother-in-law’s old dress suit, which Marianne had passed on to him, for a new one, and if he could have made up his mind to the possible recognitions and rebuffs such a step would have entailed.  As it was, he preferred his warm hiding-place in the heart of the woods, coupled with this exultant sense of an unseen and mysterious power which was running, like alcohol, through his nerves.

Real alcohol, however, was not wanting to his solitary meal.  He drenched his coffee in the cognac he always carried about with him, and then, cigarette in hand, he fell back on the heap of bracken to read a while.  The novel he sampled and threw away; the anthology soon bored him; and he spent the greater part of two hours lying on his back, smoking and thinking—­till it was safe to assume that the coast was clear round Great End Farm.  About ten o’clock, he slipped