the fence with a shrinking, yet persistent, step. She was circling
her future home and that house held a mystery.

And yet, like any other imaginative person under a stress of
aroused feeling, she might very easily be magnifying some
commonplace act into one of terrifying possibilities. One can
hammer very innocently in his own house, even at night, when
making preparations to receive fresh inmates after many years of
household neglect.

She recognised her folly before reaching the adjoining field. But
she went on. Where the fence turned, she turned, there being no
obstruction to her doing so. This brought her into a wilderness of
tangled grasses where free stepping was difficult. As she groped
her way along, she had ample opportunity to hear again the
intermittent sounds of the hammer, and to note that they reached
their maximum at a point where the ell of the judge's study
approached the fences.

Rat-tat-tat; rat-tat-tat. She hated the sound even while she
whispered to herself:

"It is just some household matter he is at work upon;--rehanging
pictures or putting up shelves. It can be nothing else."

Yet on laying her ear to the fence, she felt her sinister fears
return; and, with shrinking glances into a darkness which told her
nothing, she added in fearful murmur to herself:

"What am I taking Reuther into? I wish I knew. I wish I knew."