dragged forward with deadly pauses from one black mark to the next.
Whispers rose in the room. Something fluttered the fallen newspaper as
if a ghost-hand grasped it but had not the strength to raise; and the
window rattled, with a sharp gust of wind. The last minute Anthony spent
at the open French window with a backward eye on the clock; then he
raced down the steps as though in his turn he answered a call out of the
night.

The placid coolness of the open and the touch of moist, fresh air
against his forehead mocked him as he reached the garden, and there were
reassuring whispers from the trees he passed; yet he went on with a
long, easy stride like a runner starting a distance race. First he
skirted the row of poplars on the drive; then doubled back across the
meadow to his right and ran in a sharp-angling course across an orchard
of apple trees. Diverging from this direction, he circled at a quicker
pace toward the rear of the grounds and coursed like a wild deer over a
stretch of terraced lawns. On one of these low crests he stopped short
under the black shadow of an elm.

In the smooth-shaven centre of the hollow before him, the same ground
over which he had run and played a thousand times in his childhood, he
saw two tall men standing back to back, like fighters come to a last
stand and facing a crowd of foes. They separated at once, striding out
with a measured step, and it was not until they moved that he caught the
glint of metal at the side of one of them and knew that one was the man
who had answered to the name of John Bard and the other was the grey
man who had spoken to him at the Garden the night before. He knew it not
so much by the testimony of his eyes at that dim distance as by a queer,
inner feeling that this must be so. There was also a sense of
familiarity about the whole thing, as if he were looking on something