CHAPTER XII.

THE GARDEN.


Although Nycteris took care not to stay out long at a time, and used
every precaution, she could hardly have escaped discovery so long, had
it not been that the strange attacks to which Watho was subject had
been more frequent of late, and had at last settled into an illness
which kept her to her bed. But whether from an access of caution or
from suspicion, Falca, having now to be much with her mistress both
day and night, took it at length into her head to fasten the door as
often as she went by her usual place of exit; so that one night, when
Nycteris pushed, she found, to her surprise and dismay, that the wall
pushed her again, and would not let her through; nor with all her
searching could she discover wherein lay the cause of the change. Then
first she felt the pressure of her prison-walls, and turning, half in
despair, groped her way to the picture where she had once seen Falca
disappear. There she soon found the spot by pressing upon which the
wall yielded. It let her through into a sort of cellar, where was a
glimmer of light from a sky whose blue was paled by the moon. From the
cellar she got into a long passage, into which the moon was shining,
and came to a door. She managed to open it, and, to her great joy,
found herself in _the other place_, not on the top of the wall,
however, but in the garden she had longed to enter. Noiseless as a
fluffy moth she flitted away into the covert of the trees and shrubs,
her bare feet welcomed by the softest of carpets, which, by the very