“Caught this time, Brady, my man,” chuckled the keeper triumphantly.  “It’s gaol for you this journey, as sure’s my name’s Clegg.  Has the fellow been annoying you, Miss Sara?” he added, touching his hat respectfully as he turned towards the girl, whilst with his other hand he still retained his grip of Brady’s arm.

She laughed as though suddenly amused.

“Nothing to speak of, Clegg,” she replied.  “And I’m afraid you mustn’t send him to prison this time.  I told him if he would empty his pockets he might go.  That still holds good,” she added, looking towards Brady, who flashed her a quick look of gratitude from beneath his heavy brows and proceeded to turn out the contents of his pockets with commendable celerity.

But the keeper protested against the idea of releasing his prisoner.

“It’s a fair cop, miss,” he urged entreatingly.

“Can’t help it, Clegg.  I promised.  So you must let him go.”

The man obeyed with obvious reluctance.  Then, when Brady had hastened to make himself scarce, he turned and scrutinized the girl curiously.

“You all right, Miss Sara?  Shall I see you up to the house?”

“No, thanks, Clegg,” she said.  “I’m—­I’m quite all right.  You can go back to your breakfast.”

“Very good, miss.”  He touched his hat and plunged back again into the woods.

The girl stood still, looking after him.  She was rather white, but she remained very erect and taut until the keeper had disappeared from view.  Then the tense rigidity of her figure slackened, as a stretched wire slackens when the pull on it suddenly ceases, and she leaned helpless against the trunk of a tree, limp and shaking, every fine-strung nerve ajar with the strain of her recent encounter with Black Brady.  As she felt her knees giving way weakly beneath her, a dogged little smile twisted her lips.

“You are a cool ’and, and no mistake,” she whispered shakily, an ironical gleam flickering in her eyes.

She propped herself up against the friendly tree, and, after a few minutes, the quick throbbing of her heard steadied down and the colour began to steal back into her lips.  At length she stooped, and, picking up her hat, which had fallen off and lay on the ground at her feet, she proceeded to make her way through the woods in the direction of the house.

Barrow Court, as the name implied, was situated on the brow of a hill, sheltered from the north and easterly winds by a thick belt of pines which half-encircled it, for ever murmuring and whispering together as pine-trees will.

To Sara Tennant, the soft, sibilant noise was a beloved and familiar sound.  From the first moment when, as a child, she had come to live at Barrow, the insistent murmur of the pines had held an extraordinary fascination for her.  That, and their pungent scent, seemed to be interwoven with her whole life there, like the thread of some single colour that persists throughout the length of a woven fabric.