What had startled them?
Glancing fearfully around him he saw, or thought he saw, the crouching figure of a man in one of the bypaths of the wood, partly hidden by the thick branches which stretched across the path a short distance from the drive.
Tufnell's first impulse was to take to his heels, but he was saved from this ignominious act by the timely recollection that he was an Englishman, whose glorious privilege it is to be born without fear.

So he stood still, and in a voice which had something of a quaver in it, called out: "Who is there ?" In the wood a bird gave a single call like the note of a flute, the wind murmured in the tall avenue of trees, a frog splashed in the still waters of the lake, but there was no sound of human life.

Glancing cautiously into the wood, the butler could no longer see anything crouching in the path.

The man--if it had been a man--had vanished.
"It may have been my fancy," muttered the butler, speaking aloud as though to reassure himself by hearing his own voice.
He walked quickly onward, and was relieved when he had left the wood behind him, and could see the faint lights of the village twinkling beyond the fields.

Crossing a footbridge which spanned a narrow stream at the bottom of the meadows, Tufnell climbed over a stile, and walked along the road on the other side until he reached a cottage standing some distance back from the road at the summit of a gentle slope.
Tufnell ascended the slope and knocked loudly at the cottage door.
After the lapse of a few moments the door was opened by a woman with a candle in her hand--a stout countrywoman of forty, with a curved nose, prominent teeth, and hair screwed up in a tight knob at the back of her head.