They had arrived at the next stand, and conversation was temporarily suspended.  A flight of wild duck were put out from a pool in the wood, and for a few minutes every one was busy.  Middleton watched his master with unabated approval.

“You’re most as good as the old Squire with them high duck, Sir Everard,” he said.  “That’s true very few can touch ’em when they’re coming out nigh to the pheasants.  They can’t believe in the speed of ’em.”

“Do you think Sir Everard shoots as well as he did before he went to Africa?” Caroline asked.

Middleton touched his hat and turned to Seaman, who was standing in the background.

“Better, your Grace,” he answered, “as I was saying to this gentleman here, early this morning.  He’s cooler like and swings more level.  I’d have known his touch on a gun anywhere, though.”

There was a glint of admiration in Seaman’s eyes.  The beaters came through the wood, and the little party of guns gossiped together while the game was collected.  Terniloff, his usual pallor chased away by the bracing wind and the pleasure of the sport, was affable and even loquacious.  He had great estates of his own in Saxony and was explaining to the Duke his manner of shooting them.  Middleton glanced at his horn-rimmed watch.

“There’s another hour’s good light, sir,” he said.  “Would you care about a partridge drive, or should we do through the home copse?”

“If I might make a suggestion,” Terniloff observed diffidently, “most of the pheasants went into that gloomy-looking wood just across the marshes.”

There was a moment’s rather curious silence.  Dominey had turned and was looking towards the wood in question, as though fascinated by its almost sinister-like blackness and density.  Middleton had dropped some game he was carrying and was muttering to himself.

“We call that the Black Wood,” Dominey said calmly, “and I am rather afraid that the pheasants who find their way there claim sanctuary.  What do you think, Middleton?”

The old man turned his head slowly and looked at his master.  Somehow or other, every scrap of colour seemed to have faded out of his bronzed face.  His eyes were filled with that vague horror of the supernatural common amongst the peasant folk of various localities.  His voice shook.  The old fear was back again.

“You wouldn’t put the beaters in there, Squire?” he faltered; “not that there’s one of them would go.”

“Have we stumbled up against a local superstition?” the Duke enquired.

“That’s not altogether local, your Grace,” Middleton replied, “as the Squire himself will tell you.  I doubt whether there’s a beater in all Norfolk would go through the Black Wood, if you paid him red gold for it.—­Here, you lads.”

He turned to the beaters, who were standing waiting for instructions a few yards away.  There were a dozen of them, stalwart men for the most part, clad in rough smocks and breeches and carrying thick sticks.