there, in the garden outside.

Yet he was well aware that the prospect out of doors--its amplitude of
mellow sunlight and of space, its fair windless calm in which no leaf
stirred--was far more attractive than the room in the doorway of which he
thus elected to linger.

For the glass-door gave directly on to an extensive lawn, set out,
immediately before the house front, with scarlet and crimson geraniums in
alternating square and lozenge-shaped beds. Away on the right a couple of
grey-stemmed ilex trees--the largest in height and girth Tom had ever
seen--cast finely vandyked and platted shadow upon the smooth turf.
Beneath them, garden chairs were stationed and a tea-table spread, at
which four ladies sat--one, the elder, dressed in crude purple, the other
three, though of widely differing ages and aspect, in light coloured
summer gowns.

To the left of the lawn, a high plastered wall--masked by hollies, bay,
yew, and at the far end by masses of airy, pink-plumed tamarisk--shut off
the eastward view. But straight before him all lay open, "clean away to
the curve of the world" as he told himself, not without a pull of emotion
remembering his impending voyage. For, about sixty yards distant, the
lawn ended abruptly in a hard straight line--the land cut off sheer, as
it seemed, at the outer edge of a gravelled terrace, upon which two small
antiquated cannon were mounted, their rusty muzzles trained over swirling
blue-green tide river and yellow-grey, high-cambered sand-bar out to sea.

Between these innocuous engines of destruction, little black cannon balls
had been piled into a mimic pyramid, near to which three men stood
engaged in desultory conversation. One of them, Tom observed as markedly