THE moorland air, warm with its subtle fragrance of gorse—like the scent of peaches when the sun is shining on them—tonic with the faint tang of salt borne by clean winds that had swept across the Atlantic, came to Jean’s nostrils crisp and sparkling as a draught of golden wine.

Before her, mile after mile, lay the white road—a sword of civilisation cleaving its way remorselessly across the green wilderness of mossy turf, and on either side rose the swelling hills and jagged peaks of the great tors, melting in the far distance into a vague, formless blur of purple that might be either cloud or tor as it merged at last into the dim haze of the horizon.

“Oh, blessed, blessed Moor!” exclaimed Jean. “How I love it! You know, half the people in the world haven’t the least idea what Dartmoor is like. I was enthusing to a woman about it only the other day and she actually said, ‘Oh, yes—Dartmoor. It’s quite flat, I suppose, isn’t it?’ Flat!” with sweeping disgust.

Burke, his hand on the wheel of the big car which was eating up the miles with the facility of a boa-constrictor swallowing rabbits, smiled at the indignant little sniff with which the speech concluded.

“You don’t like dead levels, then?” he suggested.

She shook her head.

“No, I like hills—something to look up to—to climb.”

“Spiritual as well as temporal?”

She was silent a moment.

“Why, yes, I think I do.”

He smiled sardonically.

“It’s just that terrible angelic tendency of yours I complain of. It’s too much for any mere material man to live up to. I wish you’d step down to my low level occasionally. You don’t seem to be afflicted with human passions like the rest of us”—he added, a note of irritation in his voice.

“Indeed I am!”

Jean spoke impulsively, out of the depths of that inner, almost unconscious self-knowledge which lies within each one of us, dormant until some lance-like question pricks it into spontaneous affirmation. She had hardly heeded whither the conversation was tending, and she regretted her frank confession the instant it had left her lips.

Burke turned and looked at her with a curious speculation in his glance.

“I wonder if that’s true?” he said consideringly. “If so, they’re still asleep. I’d give something to be the one to rouse them.”

There was the familiar, half-turbulent quality in his voice—the sound as of something held in leash. Jean sensed the danger in the atmosphere.

“You’ll house one of them—the quite ordinary, commonplace one of bad temper, if you talk like that,” she replied prosaically. “You’ve got to play fair, Geoffrey—keep the spirit of the law as well as the letter.”

“All’s fair in love and war—as I told you before,” he retorted.

“Geoffrey”—indignantly.

“Jean!”—mimicking her. “Well, we won’t quarrel about it now. Here we are at our journey’s end. Behold the carriage drive!”

The car swung round a sharp bend and then bumped its way up a roughly-made track which served to link a species of cobbled yard, constructed at one side of the bungalow, to the road along which they had come.

The track cleaved its way, rather on the principle of a railway cutting, clean through the abrupt acclivity which flanked the road that side, and rising steeply between crumbling, overhanging banks, fringed with coarse grass and tufted with straggling patches of gorse and heather, debouched on to a broad plateau. Here the road below was completely hidden from view; on all sides there stretched only a limitless vista of wild moorland, devoid of any sign of habitation save for the bare, creeperless walls of the bungalow itself.

As the scene unfolded, Jean became suddenly conscious of a strange sense of familiarity. An inexplicable impress sion of having seen the place on some previous occasion, of familiarity with every detail of it—even to a recognition of its peculiar atmosphere of loneliness—took possession of her. For a moment she could not place the memory. Only she knew that it was associated in her mind with something disagreeable. Even now, as, at Burke’s dictation, she waited in the car while he entered the bungalow from the back, passing through in order to admit his guest by way of the front door, which had been secured upon the inside, she was aware of a feeling of intense repugnance.

And then, in a flash, recollection returned to her. This was the house of her dream—of the nightmare vision which had obsessed her during the hours of darkness following her first meeting with Geoffrey Burke.

There stood the solitary dwelling, set amid a wild and desolate country, and to one side of it grew three wretched-looking, scrubby little fir trees, all of them bent in the same direction by the keen winds as they came sweeping across the Moor from the wide Atlantic. Three Fir Bungalow! Why, the very name itself might have prewarned her!

Her eyes fixed themselves on the green-painted door. She knew quite well what must happen next. The door would open and reveal Burke standing on the threshold. She watched it with fascinated eyes.

Presently came the sound of steps, then the grating noise of a key turning stiffly in the lock. The door was flung open and Burke strode across the threshold and came to the side of the car to help her out. Jean waited, half terrified, for his first words. Would they be the words of her dream? She felt that if he chanced to say jokingly, “Will you come into my parlour?” she should scream.

“Go straight in, will you?” said Burke. “I’ll just run the car round to the garage and then we might as well get tea ready before the others come. I’m starving, aren’t you?”

The spell was broken. The everyday, commonplace words brought with them a rush of overpowering relief, sweeping away the dreamlike sense of unreality and terror, and as Jean nodded and responded gaily, “Absolutely famished!” she could have laughed aloud at the ridiculous fears which had assailed her.

The inside of the bungalow was in charming contrast to its somewhat forbidding exterior. Its living-rooms, furnished very simply but with a shrewd eye to comfort, communicated one with the other by means of double doors which, usually left open, obviated the cramped feeling that the comparatively small size of the rooms might otherwise have produced, while the two lattice windows which each boasted were augmented by French windows opening out on to a verandah which ran the whole length of the building.

Jean, having delightedly explored the front portion of the bungalow, joined Burke in the kitchen, guided thither by the clinking of crockery and the cheerful crackle of a hearth fire wakened into fresh life by the scientific application of a pair of bellows.

“I had no idea you were such a domesticated individual,” she remarked, as she watched him carefully warming the brown earthenware teapot as a preliminary to brewing the tea while she busied herself making hot buttered toast.

“Oh, Judy and I are quite independent up here, I assure you,” he answered with pardonable pride. “We never bring any of the servants from Willow Ferry, but cook for ourselves. A woman comes over every morning to do the ‘chores’—clean the place, and wash up the dishes from the day before, and so on. But beyond that we are self-sufficing.”

“Where does your woman come from? I didn’t see a house for miles round.”

“No, you can’t see the place, but there’s a little farmstead, tucked away in a hollow about three miles from here, which provides us with cream and butter and eggs—-and with our char-lady.”

Jean surveyed with satisfaction a rapidly mounting pile of delicately browned toast, creaming with golden butter.

“There, that’s ready,” she announced at last. “I do hope Judy and Co. will arrive soon. Hot buttered toast spoils with keeping; it gets all sodden and tastes like underdone shoe leather. Do you think they’ll be long?”

Burke threw a glance at the grandfather’s clock ticking solemnly away in a corner of the kitchen.

“It’s half-past four,” he said dubiously. “I don’t think we’ll risk that luscious-looking toast of yours by waiting for them. I’m going to brew the tea; the kettle’s boiling.”

“Won’t Judith think it rather horrid of us not to wait?”

“Oh, Lord, no! Judy and I never stand on any ceremony with each other. Any old thing might happen to delay them a bit.”

Jean, frankly hungry after her spin in the car through the invigorating moorland air, yielded without further protest, and tea resolved itself into a jolly little t锚te-脿-t猫te affair, partaken of in the shelter of the verandah, with the glorious vista of the Moor spread out before her delighted eyes.

Burke was in one of those rare moods of his which never failed to inspire her with a genuine liking for him—when the unruly, turbulent devil within him, so hardly held in check, was temporarily replaced by a certain spontaneous boyishness of a distinctly endearing quality—that “little boy” quality which, in a grown man, always appeals so irresistibly to any woman.

The time slipped away quickly, and it was with a shock of astonishment that Jean realised, on glancing down at the watch on her wrist, that over an hour and a half had gone by while they had been sitting chatting on the verandah.

“Geoffrey! Do you know it’s nearly six o’clock! I’m certain something must have happened. Judy and the Holfords would surely be here by now if they hadn’t had an accident of some sort.”

Burke looked at his own watch.

“Yes,” he acquiesced slowly. “It is—getting late.” A look of concern spread itself over Jean’s face.

“I think we ought to get the car out again and go and see if anything has happened,” she said decisively. “They may have had a spill. Were they coming by motor?”

“No. Judy drove d............