protruding from his jacket sleeves as he stood on tip-toe tying
up a rambling rose-shoot on his trim cedared lawn. The next house
barely showed its old red chimney-tops, above its bowers; the
next was empty, with windows vacantly gazing, its paths peopled
with great bearded weeds that stood mutely watching and guarding
the seldom-opened gate. Then came more lofty grandmotherly elms,
a dense hedge of every leaf that pricks, and then Lawford found
himself standing at the small canopied gate of the queer old
wooden house that the stranger of his talk had in part described.

It stood square and high and dark in a small amphitheatre of
verdure. Roses here and there sprang from the grass, and a
narrow box-edged path led to a small door in a low green-mantled
wing, with its one square window above the porch. And while, with
vacant mind, Lawford stood waiting, as one stands forebodingly
upon the eve of a new experience he heard as if at a distance the
sound of falling water. He still paused on the country roadside,
scrutinising this strange, still, wooden presence; but at last
with an effort he pushed open the gate, followed the winding
path, and pulled the old iron hanging bell. There came presently
a quiet tread, and Herbert himself opened the door which led into
a little square wood-panelled hall, hung with queer old prints
and obscure portraits in dark frames.

'Ah, yes, come in, Mr Lawford,' he drawled; 'I was beginning to
be afraid you were not coming.'

Lawford laid hat and walking-stick on an oak bench, and followed
his churchyard companion up a slightly inclined corridor and a
staircase into a high room, covered far up the yellowish walls