Storms lay upon it.  She turned to the road again and followed it, because it enclosed the park and she wanted to see more of its evident beauty.  It was very beautiful.  As she walked on she saw it rolled into woods and deeps filled with bracken; she saw stretches of hillocky, fine-grassed rabbit warren, and hollows holding shadowy pools; she caught the gleam of a lake with swans sailing slowly upon it with curved necks; there were wonderful lights and wonderful shadows, and brooding stillness, which made her footfall upon the road a too material thing.

Suddenly she heard a stirring in the bracken a yard or two away from her.  Something was moving slowly among the waving masses of huge fronds and caused them to sway to and fro.  It was an antlered stag who rose from his bed in the midst of them, and with majestic deliberation got upon his feet and stood gazing at her with a calmness of pose so splendid, and a liquid darkness and lustre of eye so stilly and fearlessly beautiful, that she caught her breath.  He simply gazed as her as a great king might gaze at an intruder, scarcely deigning wonder.

As she had passed on her way, Betty had seen that the enclosing park palings were decaying, covered with lichen and falling at intervals.  It had even passed through her mind that here was one of the demands for expenditure on a large estate, which limited resources could not confront with composure.  The deer fence itself, a thing of wire ten feet high, to form an obstacle to leaps, she had marked to be in such condition as to threaten to become shortly a useless thing.  Until this moment she had seen no deer, but looking beyond the stag and across the sward she now saw groups near each other, stags cropping or looking towards her with lifted heads, does at a respectful but affectionate distance from them, some caring for their fawns.  The stag who had risen near her had merely walked through a gap in the boundary and now stood free to go where he would.

“He will get away,” said Betty, knitting her black brows.  Ah! what a shame!

Even with the best intentions one could not give chase to a stag.  She looked up and down the road, but no one was within sight.  Her brows continued to knit themselves and her eyes ranged over the park itself in the hope that some labourer on the estate, some woodman or game-keeper, might be about.

“It is no affair of mine,” she said, “but it would be too bad to let him get away, though what happens to stray stags one doesn’t exactly know.”

As she said it she caught sight of someone, a man in leggings and shabby clothes and with a gun over his shoulder, evidently an under keeper.  He was a big, rather rough-looking fellow, but as he lurched out into the open from a wood Betty saw that she could reach him if she passed through a narrow gate a few yards away and walked quickly.

He was slouching along, his head drooping and his broad shoulders expressing the definite antipodes of good spirits.  Betty studied his back as she strode after him, her conclusion being that he was perhaps not a good-humoured man to approach at any time, and that this was by ill luck one of his less fortunate hours.