At first he could perceive nothing in the darkness, while feeling gently about him with his hands and feet, as those feel to whom the aid of light is denied while they search for aught they may expect to discover.
But, at last, it seemed to Bevill that the grass behind the arbour was strangely flattened down longwise, and, pausing at this discovery, his sharpened instincts were soon at work wondering what this might mean.
"A large dog sleeping here might almost have made for itself a bed," he reflected, "yet there is no dog about the place, nor, even though there were, would it have lain so straight and long. What, therefore, may have done this? What? Perhaps a man."
After which he stooped again, and, placing his hand on the pressed-down grass, discovered that it was warm.
"Something has indeed lain here but recently," Bevill said to himself. "Some eavesdropper who has heard our plans, who knows them all by now, who has it in his power to foil us. Can it have been Francbois?"
Supposing this might well be the case, Bevill determined to search the grounds and afterwards the house as thoroughly as might be, while understanding that, no matter how much he might endeavour to make that search complete, it could by no possibility be so. The gardens were too vast, the house too extensive. As he approached one spot any person whom he sought might easily move to another; chance alone, the luckiest of all chances, could bring him into contact with any lurker who should be about.
Nevertheless, he decided to attempt the search, and, feeling for his pistols, which in no circumstances was he ever separated from, he began to make as thorough an inspection of the place as was possible. Yet, when all was concluded, and when he had been all about the grounds, and had peered into the other arbours and bosquets and behind bushes, and had then once more wandered over the vast, lonely house, he had found nothing. After which, since still he felt sure there had been some listener crouching behind that arbour while the plans of himself and the others were being determined, he brought out a chair on to the lower verandah and, wrapping himself lightly in his cloak, since now the night was growing cool, determined to keep watch as long as possible.
The early summer dawn came, however, and Bevill was still awake, but had seen nothing, whereupon he at last decided that it must have been some animal that had been sleeping behind where they all sat.
"The gardener carried something else
in his hand."