He dropped his hand presently, blinked once or twice and prepared to make a more careful scrutiny of the monk's appearance. He was balked in this courageous essay. The apparition, if such it were, had acted in accordance with tradition and had vanished. While his eyes were covered it had departed, whether to left or right or merely into thin air he could not tell. He did not debate the question, either—he simply thanked his stars it was gone!
It was with considerable reluctance that he resumed his way up the path, but the daylight at the end of the trail looked inviting and reassuring compared to the twilight in the woods and he covered the distance to the spot where the monk had stood in a sort of a dogtrot.
It was here that he made a fresh discovery as he collided rather heavily with some obstruction in the path, an obstruction that gave way as his body impinged upon it, but that nearly tripped him as it fell between his legs.
He picked it up, but did not pause to examine it. The light ahead still lured and he continued his flight toward it, bearing his find with him.
He drew a deep breath of thankfulness as he finally emerged from the woods into the comforting aura of the kitchen garden; his eyes rested upon and were wonderfully soothed by a row of peaceful cabbages. Never before had he noticed how beautiful a cabbage can be, but to a man fresh from dalliance with a ghost there is something very steadying and sustaining in a glimpse of that most stolid and solid of vegetables.
There was a granite bowlder near-by on which he dropped gratefully for a minute's rest. It was while reaching for a handkerchief to pat his moist forehead that he was reminded of the object he had picked up and still carried. He looked at it now, and found that it was a heavy stick which must have been thrust firmly into the center of the path in the woods; one end of it was split, and into the cleft had been thrust a bit of folded paper—brown paper, he noted, of cheap quality, but what really took his eye as he drew it free was his own name in typewritten letters on the outside.
Evidently this was intended for him, and he was about to open it to see what message it might contain when the sound of hurrying steps from the direction of the path diverted him from his purpose. Whatever the contents of the paper might be, they were for him alone. Prompted by an instinct for secrecy which was part of his psychological cosmos, he thrust the missive into the breast-pocket of his coat and turned—with a little tremor from his nerves—to see who was coming.
It was a woman who burst from the shelter of the trees—a woman in some haste and quite obviously in some alarm. She was panting from her exertions, for she ceased running only when she reached the open, as Varr had done before her. A close-fitting felt hat was slightly askew on her head, and a once jaunty red feather that thrust up from it was now hanging limp and dejected, broken perhaps by some low-hanging branch she had failed to duck. She was dressed in a two-piece outing costume of knitted wool, and she looked just now as if those garments were too warm for comfort.
Her face brightened as she observed Varr seated on the rock, and she came toward him promptly. He brightened, too, welcoming any human being of tangible flesh and blood at that moment, although there was no living person whom he habitually detested more than he did his wife's sister, Miss October Copley. Her evident perturbation, however, gave him an uneasy premonition that he was about to hear more of his monk. But he left it to her to introduce the subject.
"Well, Ocky—reducing?"