Then it was that rising from his meditations and turning homeward, the man distinctly heard himself called from some distance.  A voice repeated his name twice—­in clear tones that might have belonged to a boy or a woman.

“Will!  Will!”

Turning sharply upon a challenge thus ringing through absolute loneliness and silence, Blanchard endeavoured, without success, to ascertain from whence the summons came.  He thought of his mother, then of his wife, yet neither was visible, and nobody appeared.  Only the old time village spread about him with its hoary granite peering from under caps of heather and furze, ivy and upspringing thorn.  And each stock and stone seemed listening with him for the repetition of a voice.  The sheep had moved elsewhere, and he stood companionless in that theatre of vanished life.  Trackways and circles wound grey around him, and the spring vegetation above which they rose all swam into one dim shade, yet moved with shadows under oncoming darkness.  Attributing the voice to his own unsettled spirit, Blanchard proceeded upon his road to where the skeleton of a dead horse stared through the gloaming beside a quaking bog.  Its bones were scattered by ravens, and Will used the bleached skull as a stepping stone.  Presently he thought of the flame-tongues that here were wont to dance through warm summer nights.  This memory recalled his own nickname in Chagford—­“Jack-o’-Lantern”—­and, for the first time in his life, he began to appreciate its significance.  Then, being a hundred yards from his starting-place in the hut-circle, he heard the hidden voice again.  Clear and low, it stole over the intervening wilderness, and between two utterances was an interval of some seconds.

“Will!  Will!”

For one instant the crepitation of fear passed over Blanchard’s scalp and skin.  He made an involuntary stride away from the voice; then he shook himself free of all alarm, and, not desirous to lose more self-respect that day, turned resolutely and shouted back,—­

“I hear ‘e.  What’s the business?  I be comin’ to ’e if you’ll bide wheer you be.”

That some eyes were watching him out of the gathering darkness he did not doubt, and soon pushing back, he stood once more in the ruined citadel of old stones, mounted one, steadied himself by a young ash that rose beside it, and raised his voice again,—­

“Now, then!  I be here.  What’s to do?  Who’s callin’ me?”

An answer came, but of a sort widely different from what he expected.  There arose, within twenty yards of him, a sound that might have been the cry of a child or the scream of a trapped animal.  Assuming it to be the latter, Will again hesitated.  Often enough he had laughed at the folk-tales of witch hares as among the most fantastic fables of the old; yet at this present moment mystic legends won point from the circumstances in which he found himself.  He hurried forward to the edge of a circle from which the sound proceeded.  Then, looking before him, he started violently, sank to his knees behind a rock, and so remained, glaring into the ring of stones.