They heard no bells, but in the extreme silence of twilight caught a faint jingle of trace-chains, and the frosty creak of runners, following Hab’s own runners in the ruts of a week ago. Some one drew slowly nearer, invisible in the black band of night, but moving as an obscure, watery reflection along the sallow ice, darkening the thin, inverted fringe of alders. The picture of that still approach, long afterward, became for Miles the symbol and essence of all misgiving.
A white horse appeared, drawing a swaddled figure on a sled.
“Hallo!” called the voice of Tony.
He pulled up, and fixed them with a strange look, his eyebrows sharply contracted in the dusk.
“Is that you?” His tone, though matter of fact, was subdued and changed. “Miles, old chap, I—They sent me after you.”
“Has—has anything happened, Tony?”
The sailor nodded soberly.
“Your grandfather wants to see you. You’d better come along.” He hesitated, then fell back upon that homely phrase which trouble has consecrated. “He—he’s a very sick man, Miles. I’ll take you.”
It seemed to Miles that all his life he had foreseen and known this moment in the dark woods.