While the moon slowly lifted from branch to branch a transient stir of life came into the forest.
Here and there he heard low cries, sometimes breaking into abrupt eddies of arrested song; thrushes, he knew, ever swift to slide their music out against any tide of light. Once or twice a blackcap, in one of the beeches near the open, sang so poignantly a brief strain that he thought it that of a nightingale. Later, in an oak glade, he heard the unmistakable song itself.
The sea sound came hollowly under the boughs like a spent billow. Instinctively he turned that way, and so crossed a wide glade that opened on the cypress alley to the west of the château.
Just as he emerged upon this glade he thought he saw a stooping figure glide swiftly athwart the northern end of it and disappear among the cypresses. Startled, he stood still.
No one stirred. Nothing moved. He could hear no sound save the faint sighing of the wind-eddy among the pines, the dull rhythmic beat of the sea falling heavily upon the sands.
"It must have been a delusion," he muttered. Yet, for the moment, he had felt certain that the crouching figure of a man had moved swiftly out of the shadow of the solitary wide-spreading thorn he knew so well, and had disappeared into the darker shadow of the cypress alley.
After all, what did it matter? It could only be some poor fellow poaching. With a smile, Alan remembered how often he had sinned likewise. He would listen, however, and give the man a fright, for he knew that Tristran de Kerival was stern in his resentment against poachers, partly because he was liberal in certain woodland-freedom he granted, on the sole condition that none of the peasants ever came within the home domain.
Soon, however, he was convinced that he was mistaken. Deep silence prevailed everywhere. Almost, he fancied, he could hear the soft fall of the dew. A low whirring sound showed that a night-jar had already begun his summer wooing. Now that, as he knew from Ynys, the cuckoo was come, and that the swallows had suddenly multiplied from a score of pioneers into a battalion of ever-flying darts; now that he had listened to the nightingales calling through the moonlit woods and had heard the love-note of the night-jar, the hot weather must be come at last—that glorious tide of golden life which flows from April to June and makes them the joy of the world.
Slowly he walked across the glade. At the old thorn he stopped, and leaned a while against its rugged, twisted bole, recalling incident after incident associated with it.