He said we were “just there.”

* * * * *

I saw the Home Farm first as a little square haze of yellow light far up in the sky.  I didn’t realise the sharp rise in the ground immediately in front of us, and that rectangular beacon, high in the air, seemed a fantastically impossible thing.  I pointed it out to Jervaise who was holding his head down as if he were afraid the summer rain might do some serious injury to his face.

“Some one up, anyway,” was his comment.

“Very far up,” I murmured.  I could not quite believe, even then, that it could be a window.  I was disappointed when we had climbed the hill and stood only a few feet below the beacon, to discover that this too, was another instance of the all too credible commonplace.  I suppose men like Frank Jervaise never long to believe in the impossible.  I was, however, agreeably surprised to find that he could be nervous.

He hesitated, looking up at the prism of light that splayed out through the first floor window, and set a silver fire to the falling rain.  “Suppose we’d better knock,” he grumbled.

“D’you know whose window it is?” I asked.

Apparently he didn’t.  He made a dive into a deeper obscurity and I lost him until I heard his knock.  I was glad that he should have knocked with such decent restraint, but all the effect of it was instantly shattered by the response.  For at his first subdued rap, a dog with a penetratingly strident bark set up a perfectly detestable clamour within the house.  It was just as if Jervaise’s touch on the door had liberated the spring of some awful rattle.  Every lovely impulse of the night must have fled dismayed, back into the peace and beauty of the wood; and I was more than half inclined to follow.

Until that appalling racket was set loose I had been regarding this midnight visit to the farm as a natural and enticing adventure, altogether in keeping with the dramatic movement preluded by the chime of the stable-clock.  That confounded terrier, whose voice so clearly proclaimed his breed, had dragged us down to the baldest realism.  We were intruders upon the decencies of civilisation.  That dog was not to be misled by any foolish whimsies of the imagination.  He was a thorough-going realist, living in a tangible, smellable world of reality, and he knew us for what we were—­marauders, disturbers of the proper respectable peace of twentieth century farms.  He lashed himself into ecstasies of fury against our unconventionality; he rose to magnificent paroxysms of protest that passionately besought High Heaven and Farmer Banks to open the door and let him get at us.

But no one came.  There may have been other sounds coming from the house besides that infuriated demand for vengeance, but all inferior noises—­and surely all other noises must have been inferior to that clamour—­were absorbed and flattened out of existence.  We were in a world occupied by the bark of a single dog, and any addition to that occupation would have been superfluous.