CHAPTER VIII
TOM dodged hither and thither through lanes until he was well out of the track of returning scholars, and then fell into a moody jog.

He crossed a small "branch" two or three times, because of a prevailing juvenile superstition that to cross water baffled pursuit.

Half an hour later he was disappearing behind the Douglas mansion on the summit of Cardiff Hill, and the schoolhouse was hardly distinguishable away off in the valley behind him.

He entered a dense wood, picked his pathless way to the centre of it, and sat down on a mossy spot under a spreading oak.

There was not even a zephyr stirring; the dead noonday heat had even stilled the songs of the birds; nature lay in a trance that was broken by no sound but the occasional far-off hammering of a woodpecker, and this seemed to render the pervading silence and sense of loneliness the more profound.