Wolf had the strangest feeling as he clicked the latch of the gate to let her through. It was as if he were breaking some law of nature⁠—refuting some inflexible scientific category of cause and effect.

He kept his arm tight about her, and led her up the road, in the direction away from the town, till they came to the place where the immense ash-tree lifted its branches into the dark air high above their heads.

There was a small gap in the hedge at this point, and Wolf pulled her through it, into the meadow on the other side. “For the second time tonight!” whispered his demon. But for some reason the mockery glanced off from Wolf’s present mood of slippery buoyancy, without causing him the slightest discomfort. “Very well, then,” he mentally retorted, “for the second time it shall be!”