III
The Parson was stamping up and down like a man in mortal pain.
"And I wasn't there," he moaned. "I left him to do my dirty work—and ran!"
Opening the back-door, he gazed out on the encircling Downs, the light white now behind their blackness.
Outside the door was a fairy circle—just such a circle as a long-armed man with a sweeping sword would make—and round it not twinkling fairies but dead men. It was as though this was a magic ring, fatal to all who crossed it.
In the centre of the ring he could detect heel-marks, where the Gentleman had stood.
Fitting his own heels to the dents, he stood with crouching knees, making play with Polly among the ghosts of the smugglers.
He saw it all: the swarming satyrs, the closing door, the white-faced rifleman at the crack, and the Gentleman, back to the door, face to the Downs, his blade leaping out to scorch intruders within the pale.
"O Polly!" he cried. "We three—we three could have held the door against ten thousand."
The tears flowed down his face. The thought of this young man spending himself for a legless sailor, and a wounded rifleman, his enemies, who half-an-hour before had stood between him and his life's success, touched him to the quick.
"What a man!" he cried.