But you'd better git home." Patton took the hint, gave a grunt of thanks as his companion handed him two rabbits, which he stowed away in the capacious pockets of his poacher's coat, and slouched off home by as sheltered and roundabout a way as possible.
Hurd, left to himself, stowed his nets and other apparatus in a hidden crevice of the bank, and strolled along to set his snares in three hare-runs, well known to him, round the further side of the wood.
Then he waited impatiently for the striking of the clock in Mellor church.

The cold was bitter, but his night's work was not over yet, and he had had very good reasons for getting rid of Patton.
Almost immediately the bell rang out, the echo rolling round the bend of the hills in the frosty silence.

Half-past twelve Hurd scrambled over the ditch, pushed his way through the dilapidated hedge, and began to climb the ascent of the wood.

The outskirts of it were filled with a thin mixed growth of sapling and underwood, but the high centre of it was crowned by a grove of full-grown beeches, through which the moon, now at its height, was playing freely, as Hurd clambered upwards amid the dead leaves just freshly strewn, as though in yearly festival, about their polished trunks.

Such infinite grace and strength in the line work of the branches!--branches not bent into gnarled and unexpected fantasies, like those of the oak, but gathered into every conceivable harmony of upward curve and sweep, rising all together, black against the silvery light, each tree related to and completing its neighbour, as though the whole wood, so finely rounded on itself and to the hill, were but one majestic conception of a master artist.
But Hurd saw nothing of this as he plunged through the leaves.