Something was moving slowly among the waving masses of huge fronds and caused them to sway to and fro.

It was an antlered stag who rose from his bed in the midst of them, and with majestic deliberation got upon his feet and stood gazing at her with a calmness of pose so splendid, and a liquid darkness and lustre of eye so stilly and fearlessly beautiful, that she caught her breath.

He simply gazed as her as a great king might gaze at an intruder, scarcely deigning wonder.
As she had passed on her way, Betty had seen that the enclosing park palings were decaying, covered with lichen and falling at intervals.

It had even passed through her mind that here was one of the demands for expenditure on a large estate, which limited resources could not confront with composure.

The deer fence itself, a thing of wire ten feet high, to form an obstacle to leaps, she had marked to be in such condition as to threaten to become shortly a useless thing.