The autumn evening was far advanced when Aldous Raeburn, after his day's shooting, passed again by the gates of Mellor Park on his road home.

He glanced up the ill-kept drive, with its fine overhanging limes, caught a glimpse to the left of the little church, and to the right, of the long eastern front of the house; lingered a moment to watch the sunset light streaming through the level branches of two distant cedars, standing black and sharp against the fiery west, and then walked briskly forwards in the mood of a man going as fast as may be to an appointment he both desires and dreads.
He had given his gun to the keeper, who had already sped far ahead of him, in the shooting-cart which his master had declined.

His dog, a black retriever, was at his heels, and both dog and man were somewhat weary and stiff with exercise.

But for the privilege of solitude, Aldous Raeburn would at that moment have faced a good deal more than the two miles of extra walking which now lay between him and Maxwell Court.
About him, as he trudged on, lay a beautiful world of English woodland.
After he had passed through the hamlet of Mellor, with its three-cornered piece of open common, and its patches of arable--representing the original forest-clearing made centuries ago by the primitive fathers of the village in this corner of the Chiltern uplands--the beech woods closed thickly round him.

Beech woods of all kinds--from forest slopes, where majestic trees, grey and soaring pillars of the woodland roof, stood in stately isolation on the dead-leaf carpet woven by the years about their carved and polished bases, to the close plantations of young trees, where the saplings crowded on each other, and here and there amid the airless tangle of leaf and branch some long pheasant-drive, cut straight through the green heart of the wood, refreshed the seeking eye with its arched and far-receding path.