John Grimbal sat upon a felled tree beside the pools, and while he remained motionless, his pipe unlighted, his gun beside him, a spaniel worked below in the sere sedges at the water’s margin.  Presently the dog barked, a moor-hen splashed, half flying, half swimming, across the larger lake, and a snipe got up and jerked crookedly away on the wind.  The dog stood with one fore-paw lifted and the water dripping along his belly.  He waited for a crack and puff of smoke and the thud of a bird falling into the water or the underwood.  But his master did not fire; he did not even see the flushing of the snipe; so the dog came up and remonstrated with his eyes.  Grimbal patted the beast’s head, then rose from his seat on the felled tree, stretched his arms, sat down again and lighted his pipe.

The event of the morning had turned his thoughts in the old direction, and now they were wholly occupied with Will Blanchard.  Since his fit of futile spleen and fury after the meeting with Phoebe, John had slowly sunk back into the former nerveless attitude.  From this an occasional wonder roused him—­a wonder as to whether the woman had ever given her husband his message at all.  His recent active hatred seemed a little softened, though why it should be so he could not have explained.  Now he sometimes assured himself that he should not proceed to extremities, but hang his sword over Will’s head a while and possibly end by pardoning him altogether.

Thus he paltered with his better part and presented a spectacle of one mentally sick unto death by reason of shattered purpose.  His unity of design was gone.  He had believed the last conversation with Phoebe in itself sufficient to waken his pristine passion, but anger against himself had been a great factor of that storm, apart from which circumstance he made the mistake of supposing that his passion slept, whereas in reality it was dead.  Now, if Grimbal was to be stung into activity, it must be along another line and upon a fresh count.

Then, as he reflected by the little tarns, there approached Will Blanchard himself; and Grimbal, looking up, saw him standing among white tussocks of dead grass by the water-side and rubbing the mud off his boots upon them.  For a moment his breath quickened, but he was not surprised; and yet, before Will reached him, he had time to wonder at himself that he was not.

Blanchard, calling at the Red House ten minutes after the master’s departure, had been informed by old Lawrence Vallack, John’s factotum, that he had come too late.  It transpired, however, that Grimbal had taken his gun and a dog, so Will, knowing the estate, made a guess at the sportsman’s destination, and was helped on his way when he came within earshot of the barking spaniel.

Now that animal resented his intrusion, and for a moment it appeared that the brute’s master did also.  Will had already seen Grimbal where he sat, and came swiftly towards him.