In the mean time, the young officer, who had disappeared in the
shrubbery, whether he had or had not been a spectator of the scene,
exhibited some signs of agitation. He walked rapidly on,
occasionally switching the air with a wand of willow, from which he
had impatiently plucked the leaves, through an alley of ceanothus,
until he reached a little thicket of evergreens, which seemed to
oppose his further progress. Turning to one side, however, he
quickly found an entrance to a labyrinthine walk, which led him at
last to an open space and a rustic summer-house that stood beneath
a gnarled and venerable pear-tree. The summerhouse was a quaint
stockade of dark madrono boughs thatched with red-wood bark,
strongly suggestive of deeper woodland shadow. But in strange
contrast, the floor, table, and benches were thickly strewn with
faded rose-leaves, scattered as if in some riotous play of
children. Captain Carroll brushed them aside hurriedly with his
impatient foot, glanced around hastily, then threw himself on the
rustic bench at full length and twisted his mustache between his
nervous fingers. Then he rose as suddenly, with a few white petals
impaled on his gilded spurs and stepped quickly into the open
sunlight.

He must have been mistaken! Everything was quiet around him, the
far-off sound of wheels in the avenue came faintly, but nothing
more.

His eye fell upon the pear-tree, and even in his preoccupation he
was struck with the signs of its extraordinary age. Twisted out of
all proportion, and knotted with excrescences, it was supported by