102 A TRAGIC INCIDENT 



at any moment. As he was far from being 

 assured that she would not attempt to get at 

 him before the day was out, he made a point of 

 keeping awake and on the look-out for sign 

 of movement in the eyrie between him and 

 the blue vault. 



Higher and higher rose the sun, flooding the 

 hill with light, warming the resinous trees and 

 filling the wood with their fragrance. But for 

 the cold nip in the air it might almost have 

 been a summer's day. One less suggestive of 

 evil happening could not be ; yet the first act 

 of a tragedy of which the wood was to be the 

 theatre was being enacted less than a furlong 

 away, where two weasels were pressing a 

 rabbit from gallery to gallery of its burrow. 

 No hope for the defenceless thing lay there, 

 still less in the wood across which it presently 

 came loping with fateful laboured movement. A 

 look of entreaty appeared in the rabbit's start- 

 ing eyes when it saw the hare, but the doomed 

 creature did not stop. On, on it struggled, 

 followed still by the murderers, the two puny, 

 lithe, fiendish-looking weasels. 



The sight of these bloodthirsty miscreants 

 stirred the hare to fury ; scarcely had they 

 passed when he rose and stamped with his 

 hind feet : surely not to warn his own kind, it 



