All day long, complaints came pouring in to the Master. Lad had destroyed the whole "set" of cream. Lad had chased the red cow till it would be a miracle if she didn't fall sick of it. Lad had scared poor dear little Peter Grimm so badly that the cat seemed likely to spend all the rest of its nine lives squalling in the tree-top and crossly refusing to come down.
Lad had spoiled a Sunday leg of mutton, up at the Lodge. Lad had made a perfectly respectable horse run madly away for nearly twenty-five feet, and had given the horse's owner a blasphemous half-mile run over a plowed field after a cherished and ravished lap-robe. Lad had well-nigh killed a neighbor's particularly killable dog. Lad had wantonly destroyed the nurse's very newest and most expensive uniform. All day it was Lad--Lad--Lad!
Lad, it seemed, was a storm-center, whence radiated complaints that ran the whole gamut from tears to lurid profanity; and, to each and every complainant, the Master made the same answer:
"Leave him alone. We're just out of hell--Lad and I! He's doing the things I'd do myself, if I had the nerve."
Which, of course, was a manifestly asinine way for a grown man to talk.
Long after dusk, Lad pattered meekly home, very tired and quite sane. His spell of imbecility had worn itself out. He was once more his calmly dignified self, though not a little ashamed of his babyish pranks, and mildly wondering how he had come to behave so.
Still, he could not grieve over what he had done. He could not grieve over anything just yet. The Mistress was alive! And while the craziness had passed, the happiness had not. Tired, drowsily at peace with all the world, he curled up under the piano and went to sleep.
He slept so soundly that the locking of the house for the night did not rouse him. But something else did. Something that occurred long after everyone on The Place was sound asleep. Lad was joyously pursuing, through the forest aisles of dreamland, a whole army of squirrels that had not sense enough to climb trees--when in a moment, he was wide awake and on guard. Far off, very far off, he heard a man walking.
Now, to a trained dog there is as much difference in the sound of human footfalls as, to humans, there is a difference in the aspect of human faces. A belated countryman walking along the highway, a furlong distant, would not have awakened Lad from sleep. Also, he knew and could classify, at any distance, the footsteps of everyone who lived on The Place. But the steps that had brought him wide awake and on the alert to-night, did not belong to one of The Place's people; nor were they the steps of anybody who had a right to be on the premises.