You may say that, my father being blind, it need not have entered into my calculations whether his assailant had approached in full view of the doorway or from the rear.  But the assailant—­let us suppose for a moment—­was some one ignorant of my father’s blindness.  This granted, as it was at least possible, he would be likeliest to steal upon the summer-house from the rear.  I cannot say more than that, standing there by the doorway, I felt the approach from the streamside to be most dangerous, and therefore the likeliest.

In a few minutes, as I well knew, Plinny would be coming in search of me, to persuade me back to the house to breakfast and bed.  I stepped down to the streamside, where the beehives stood in a row on the brink, paused for a moment to listen to the hum within them, and note that the bees were making ready to swarm, crossed the bridge, and tried the rusty hasp of the door.  It yielded stiffly; but as I pulled the door inwards it brushed aside a mass of spider’s web, white and matted, that could not be less than a month old.  Also it brushed a clump of ivy overgrowing the lintel, and shook down about half an ounce of powdery dust into my hair and eyes.  I scarcely troubled to look through.  Clearly, the door had not been opened for many weeks—­possibly not since my last holidays.

I recrossed the bridge and inspected the side-gate.  This opened, as I have said, upon a lane never used but by the woodmen on Miss Belcher’s estate, and by them very seldom.  It entered the park by a stone bridge across the stream and by a ruinous gate, the gaps of which had been patched with furze faggots.  The roadway itself was carpeted with last year’s leaves from a coppice across the lane—­ leaves which the winter’s rains had beaten into a black compost; and almost facing the side-gate was a stile whence a tangled footpath led into the coppice.

I had stepped out into the lane, and was staring over the stile into the green gloom of the coppice, when I heard Plinny’s voice calling to me from the house, and I had half turned to hail in answer when my eyes fell on the upper bar of the stile.

Across the edge of it ran a dark brown smear—­a smear which I recognized for dried blood.

“Harry!  Harry dear!”

“Plinny!” I raced back through the garden, and almost fell into her arms as she came along the path between the currant-bushes in search of me.  “Plinny—­oh, Plinny!” I gasped.

“My dear child, what has happened?”

Before I could answer there came wafted to our ears from eastward a sound of distant shouting, and almost simultaneously, from the high-road near at hand, the trit-trot of hoofs approaching at great speed from westward, and the “Who-oop!” of a man’s voice, lusty on the morning air.

“That will be Mr. Jack Rogers,” said Plinny.  “He brings us news, for certain!  Yes; he is reining up.”

We ran through the house together, and reached the front door in time to witness a most extraordinary scene.