and then, without waiting to see whether the men would make any attempt to escape from their imprisonment, he started for the Parsonage.
Before he got there, however, he found himself staggering, and knew that he would not have strength left to reach the house. As he stood swaying to and fro for a few seconds on the footpath, he caught the sound of a wagon going along slowly at the foot of the hill. There was a man walking beside the horses, cracking his whip and urging them on. It was too dark for Tregenna to see either wagon or man; but the frosty air carried the sounds to him clearly, and carried back his fainting cry—
"Help, help!"
Then he fell down on the grass beside the footpath.
When he came to himself, after a curious experience of being in the sea, swimming for life, with a dozen faces he knew around him, he found that he was still lying on the grass, but that there was at least one face he knew bending over him, looking very weird and strange by the light of a heavy lantern, which
