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Updated: June 25, 2025
"What! vanished away into nothing?" asked Van Cheele excitedly. "No; that is the dreadful part of it," answered the artist; "on the open hillside where the boy had been standing a second ago, stood a large wolf, blackish in colour, with gleaming fangs and cruel, yellow eyes. You may think " But Van Cheele did not stop for anything as futile as thought.
"Since it interests you, rabbits, wild-fowl, hares, poultry, lambs in their season, children when I can get any; they're usually too well locked in at night, when I do most of my hunting. It's quite two months since I tasted child-flesh." Ignoring the chaffing nature of the last remark Van Cheele tried to draw the boy on the subject of possible poaching operations.
On a shelf of smooth stone overhanging a deep pool in the hollow of an oak coppice a boy of about sixteen lay asprawl, drying his wet brown limbs luxuriously in the sun. His wet hair, parted by a recent dive, lay close to his head, and his light-brown eyes, so light that there was an almost tigerish gleam in them, were turned towards Van Cheele with a certain lazy watchfulness.
The prospect of this wild, nude animal in Van Cheele's primly ordered house was certainly an alarming one. "If you don't go. I shall have to make you," said Van Cheele. The boy turned like a flash, plunged into the pool, and in a moment had flung his wet and glistening body half-way up the bank where Van Cheele was standing.
And with a view to minimising that catastrophe, Van Cheele hastily obscured as much of his unwelcome guest as possible under the folds of a Morning Post. At that moment his aunt entered the room. "This is a poor boy who has lost his way and lost his memory.
Van Cheele began to have an irritated feeling that he was grappling with a problem that was eluding him. "What do you feed on?" he asked. "Flesh," said the boy, and he pronounced the word with slow relish, as though he were tasting it. "Flesh! What Flesh?"
"I don't fancy any dog would be very anxious for my company, especially at night." Van Cheele began to feel that there was something positively uncanny about the strange-eyed, strange-tongued youngster. "I can't have you staying in these woods," he declared authoritatively. "I fancy you'd rather have me here than in your house," said the boy.
Van Cheele heard a shrill wail of fear, and stopped running. Nothing was ever seen again of the Toop child or Gabriel-Ernest, but the latter's discarded garments were found lying in the road so it was assumed that the child had fallen into the water, and that the boy had stripped and jumped in, in a vain endeavour to save it.
Such dreadful things should not be said even in fun. Van Cheele, contrary to his usual wont, did not feel disposed to be communicative about his discovery in the wood.
It was an unexpected apparition, and Van Cheele found himself engaged in the novel process of thinking before he spoke. Where on earth could this wild-looking boy hail from? The miller's wife had lost a child some two months ago, supposed to have been swept away by the mill-race, but that had been a mere baby, not a half-grown lad. "What are you doing there?" he demanded.
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