Carthew seemed to have seen something of interest in the dark wood behind Captain Dove, and Captain Dove looked round in instant alarm. It would have been most unpleasant to find that he himself was being spied upon. There was some one or some thing, a tall white shadow, very dimly discernible, moving among the gloom.
A sudden and most unusual sensation of panic seized Captain Dove. The inexplicable shape was flitting soundlessly toward him. He felt thankful that Carthew was there behind him, alive and well, for company. But when he rose upright and glanced swiftly over one shoulder the plateau was empty. Carthew had gone.
The evening was drawing in, and even the pathway by which they had come there was growing dim as the light slowly failed. Captain Dove made a blind dash for it across the open space, and so fled headlong, in fear.
He only once looked back, and then he saw the shadow again. It was following him. And he did not stop running till he reached the drawbridge of the castle. But there he halted, panting, to swear at himself for a superstitious old fool, and stare back into the woods with eyes in which terror was mingled with rage.
"Some stray cow—or maybe a stag!" he declared to himself. "If I had had a shot-gun handy—or even my revolver—"
But, stare as he would, he could see nothing more of the creature. And he went in through the postern, still swearing under his breath.
He had never felt quite at his ease in the great main hall of the castle, which, with its empty suits of mail in all sorts of unexpected corners, the flags overhead flapping soundlessly in every draught, the pale faces peering down from their dark frames in the gallery, possessed an uncanny atmosphere of its own, especially in the dusk.
However, the two big fires blazing on their cavernous hearths at either side of its wide expanse made it a good deal more homelike, less eerie than it had seemed when he had first seen it. And he crossed it almost without concern on his way toward his own quarters in the North Keep.
But by the way some obscure movement among the shadows beyond the nearer fire brought his heart to his mouth again in an instant, and a hand slipped mechanically toward the empty hip-pocket beneath the skirt of his coat. He had halted. He moved on, into the dim recess whence some one was watching him, and presently emerged again, dragging after him into the firelight a shock-headed, pasty-faced lad, whose long neck was writhing in anguish as Captain Dove gave the long ear between his finger and thumb another fierce tweak.
"What the devil are you doing here!" the old man demanded, peering into the features of Mr. Jobling's managing clerk.