"It is just as well for you to be prepared.

You will not be afraid, dear?
You will have the doctor on one side of you and me on the other." "I am only afraid of one thing," she answered a little enigmatically.

"I have been so happy lately." Dominey, changed into ordinary morning clothes, with a thick cord tied round his body, a revolver in his pocket, and a loaded stick in his hand, spent the remainder of the night and part of the early morning concealed behind a great clump of rhododendrons, his eyes fixed upon the shadowy stretch of park which lay between the house and the Black Wood.
The night was moonless but clear, and when his eyes were once accustomed to the pale but sombre twilight, the whole landscape and the moving objects upon it were dimly visible.

The habits of his years of bush life seemed instinctively, in those few hours of waiting, to have reestablished themselves.

Every sense was strained and active; every night sound--of which the hooting of some owls, disturbed from their lurking place in the Black Wood, was predominant--heard and accounted for.