At last, turning a corner quickly, she came upon a
living thing that did not fly from her. Astretch in a pool of mud
was an enormous sow, gigantic beyond the town-woman's wildest
computation of swine-flesh, and speedily alert to resent and if
necessary repel the unwonted intrusion. It was Sylvia's turn to
make an unobtrusive retreat. As she threaded her way past
rickyards and cowsheds and long blank walls, she started suddenly
at a strange sound--the echo of a boy's laughter, golden and
equivocal. Jan, the only boy employed on the farm, a towheaded,
wizen-faced yokel, was visibly at work on a potato clearing half-
way up the nearest hill-side, and Mortimer, when questioned, knew
of no other probable or possible begetter of the hidden mockery
that had ambushed Sylvia's retreat. The memory of that
untraceable echo was added to her other impressions of a furtive
sinister "something " that hung around Yessney.
Of Mortimer she saw very little; farm and woods and trout-streams
seemed to swallow him up from dawn till dusk. Once, following the
direction she had seen him take in the morning, she came to an
open space in a nut copse, further shut in by huge yew trees, in
the centre of which stood a stone pedestal surmounted by a small
bronze figure of a youthful Pan.
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