Soon he stopped, listening—looked around without seeming to do either. A runnel of water trickled down a stony course, partly under the stones; in hot weather it was dry. He moved aside two stones, casually as though thinking of something else. In the solemn silence of the gnarled oak-wood he could see nobody, but it did not follow that nobody could see him.
But—something could—something did. The round, white, eye-like disc, with its five star points, stared up at him—stared with baleful—almost human, or rather demoniacal glance, from its damp bed, where he himself had placed it months before. It should have been red with rust—yet it was not. This too struck him, and he began to feel himself hopelessly enmeshed. That other, its counterpart, who had placed it there? He had been cherishing a faint and utterly unreasonable thought that in a moment of aberration, he himself might have removed it from the original hiding place to which he had consigned it during Helston Varne’s temporary imprisonment. But no. There was the other, in the disused part of his house. He had just put it there, and he had just left it there. He could not get away from that.
The beauties of the glorious woodland were around him as he retraced his steps, the networking of the sunlight through the tree-tops, the cool, moist fragrance of underfoot moss, the tap-tap of a woodpecker coming in chastened echo through the columns of tree trunks, then the gurgling trill of a thrush. Everywhere peace, the sweet English woodland peace of a cloudless late spring or early summer day. Yet John Seward Mervyn went up that woodland path wearing a grey, ashen face, and carrying something very like utter despair in his heart.
As he arrived at the house, the two girls were coming down the path. A clear, laughing hail of welcome greeted him.
“We’ve been in luck, dear,” cried Melian, taking a fishing basket from old Joe, who was walking behind. “Look at this.”
She displayed eight or nine perch—two quite big ones.
“Violet caught those,” she went on. “I’ve never caught any as big. I don’t believe there are any bigger ones in Plane Pond; eh, Joe.”
“They be middlin’ fish, Miss Melun—they be middlin’ fish, sure-ly,” answered the old rustic.
“Why, I’m sure the big ’un must be over a pound,” rattled on the girl joyously. “And didn’t Violet just prick her fingers over his spines.”
Here again Mervyn conjured up another picture as he contemplated the great spiny dorsal fin and black stripes of a really finely conditioned perch. She had pricked her fingers with something very harmless that time, he thought, grimly.