Harry left him without more words, and strolled out again into the sunlight, which had recaptured all its early brilliance. Had ever a man been so ready and eager to spoil his own happiness, he wondered. Half an hour ago he had blackened the world by his utterly unfounded fears, all built on a fabric of nothingness, and in a moment reared to such a height that they had blotted the very sun from the sky, and like a vampire sucked the beauty from all that was fair. A thought had built them, a word now had dispelled them.
He went round to the front of the house, where he found a gardener busy among the flower beds, and they went together to examine the great hedge. It would be a week's work, the man said, to restore it to its proper shape, and Harry answering that it must therefore be begun without delay, he went off after a ladder and pruning tools. Then, poking idly at its compacted wall with his stick as he walked along it, Harry found that after overcoming the first resistance, the stick seemed to penetrate into emptiness, though the whole hedge could not have been less than six or eight feet thick. This presented points of interest, and he walked up to the end, far away from the house, and, pushing through a belt of trees into which the hedge ran, proceeded to examine it from the other side. Here, at once, he found the key to this strange thing, for, half overgrown with young shoots, stood an opening some five feet high, leading into the centre of the hedge, down which ran a long passage. More correctly speaking, indeed, the hedge was not one, but two, planted some three feet apart, and this corridor of gloomy green lights led straight down it toward the house. At the far end, again, was a similar half-overgrown door, coming out of which one turned the corner of the hedge and emerged on to the gravel sweep close by the house, immediately below the windows of the gun room.
To Harry there was something mysterious and delightful about this discovery, which gave him a keen, childlike sense of pleasure. To judge from the growth over the entrances to the passage, it must have been long undiscovered, and he determined to ask his uncle whether he remembered it. Then, suddenly and unreasonably, he changed his mind; the charm of this mystery would be gone if he shared it with another, even if he suspected that another already knew it, and, smiling at himself for his childish secrecy and reserve, he strolled back again to meet the gardener to whom he had given orders to clip it. There must be no possibility of his discovery of the secret doors; the box hedge should be clipped only with a view to the road; the other side should not be touched—a whited sepulchre. These orders given, he went back to the house to wait for the appearance of Mr. Francis.
The latter soon came downstairs, with a great Panama hat on his head, round which was tacked a gaudy ribbon; he hummed a cheerful little tune as he came.
"Ah, Harry!" he said, "I did not mean you to wait in for me on this glorious morning, for I think I will not go fast or far. Long-limbed, lazy fellow," he said, looking at him as he sat in the low chair.
Harry got up, stretching his long limbs.
"Lazy I am not," he said; "I have done a world full of things this morning. I have bathed, I have breakfasted, I have listened to your music, I have given a hundred orders to the gardeners, at least I gave one, and I have read the papers. Where shall we go, Uncle Francis?"
"Where you please, as long as we go together, and you will consent to go slowly and talk to me. I am a little shaky still, I find, now that I try my legs; but, Harry, there is a lightness about my heart from your news of last night."
"It is good to hear you say that, for I can not convey to you how I looked forward to telling you. And you feel, you really feel, all you said to me?"