Was he dreaming?  What was the meaning of all this?  “Oh, Christ!” he groaned.  “What does it all mean?” and he rubbed his eyes and looked again, then sat down, all his pride and anger raging within him as he watched, kindling the jungle instinct within him into a raging fire, to fight for his mate—­his by right of class and association.  He doubled back, as the two figures turned in the direction of the copse—­the resolve in his mind to go back and forcibly tear Mysie from this unknown stranger.  He would fight for her.  She was his, and he was prepared to assert his right of possession before all the world.

In a mad fury he started forward, a raging anger in his heart, striding along in quick, determined, relentless steps, his blood jumping and his energy roused, and all the madness of a strong nature coursing through him; but after a few yards he hesitated, stopped, and then turned back.

After all, Mysie must have made an appointment with this man.  She evidently wanted him, and that was her reason for asking to be left alone.

“Oh, God!” he groaned again, sitting down.  “This is hellish!” and he began to turn over the whole business in his mind once more.

Long he sat, and the darkness fell over the moor, matching the darkness that brooded over his heart and mind.  He heard the moor-birds crying in restlessness, and saw the clouds piling themselves up, and come creeping darkly over the higher ground, bringing a threat of rain in their wake.  The moan in the wind became louder, presaging a storm; but still he sat or lay upon the rough, withered grass, fighting out his battle, meeting the demons of despair and gloom, and the legions of pain and misery, in greater armies than ever he had met them before.

Again he groaned, as his ear caught the plaintive note of a widowed partridge, which sat behind him upon a grassy knoll of turf, crying out on the night air, an ache in every cry, the grief and sorrow of his wounded, breaking heart.

It seemed to Robert that there was a strange sort of kinship between him and the bird—­a kinship and understanding which touched a chord of ready feeling in his heart.  The ominous hoot of an owl in the wood startled him, and he rose to his feet.  He could not sit still.  Idleness would drive him mad.  He strode off on to the moor, away from the track, his whole being burning in torture, and his mind a mass of unconnected fancies and pains.

Over the bogs and through the marshes, the madness of despair within him, he heeded not the deep ditches and the bog-pools.  They were the pits of darkness, the sty-pools, which his soul must either cross, or in which he must perish.  He tore up the hills into the mists and the rising storm, the thick clouds, full of rain, enveloping him, and matching the terrible fury of his breast.

On, ever on, in the darkness and the mire, through clumps of whin and stray bushes of wild briar.  On, always on, driven and lashed into action by the resistless desire to get away from himself.  He knew not the direction he had taken.  He had lost his bearings on the moor; the darkness had completely hidden the landmarks, and even had he been conscious of his actions, he could not have told in which part of the moor he was.