Page:Belloc Lowndes--The chink in the armour.djvu/227

Rh It was delightfully quiet and still in the wood, and Sylvia wondered vaguely why the Wachners never took their tea out there. But foreigners are very law-abiding, or so she supposed, and the wood, if a piece of no-man's land, was for sale. Up a path she could see the back of a large board.

It was clear that this pretty bit of woodland would have been turned into villa plots long ago had it been nearer to a road. But it was still a stretch of primeval forest. Here and there, amid the tufts of grass, lay the husks of last autumn's chestnuts.

Sylvia slowly followed the little zigzag way which cut across the wood, and then, desiring to sit down for awhile, she struck off to the right, towards a spot where she saw that the brambles and the undergrowth had been cleared away.

Even here, where in summer the sun never penetrated, the tufts of coarse grass were dried up by the heat. She glanced down; no, there was no fear that the hard, dry ground would stain her pretty cotton frock.

And then, as she sat there, Sylvia gradually became aware that close to her, where the undergrowth began again, the earth had recently been disturbed. Over an irregular patch of about a yard square the sods had been dug up, and then planted again.

The thought passed through her mind that children must have been playing there, and that they had made a rude attempt to destroy their handiwork, or rather to prevent its being noticed, by placing the branch of a tree across the little plot of ground where the earth had been disturbed. It was this broken branch, of which the