“You tol’ me to change the subject,” said Bob with deep grievance.
“Don’t be sil. Say, I think there is somebody in there. Look quick.”
But I had fled into the corridor and, laughing heartily within, was half-way up the stairs.
In my room I immersed myself in that task of writing which has become almost my principal interest. I quite lost track of time while I wrote of Salt’s arrival last evening and the rest of it. With a start I recalled Aire, looked at my watch, and leaped down the stairs. It was nearly four.
The short, spindly-legged man was waiting, and with a touch of annoyance I saw that Maryvale was consulting some book in a corner of the library, a book which he put down upon my arrival as if he expected to accompany us.
“Gilbert has consented to come along.”
“Oh? Glad.”
The sky was unblemished with cloud when we set out for that supposedly uneventful walk in the bracing hill-air, but the sun had sloped nearly to the high horizon of the ridge, and the light already had in it a subtle infiltration of yellow. Some jewels still glittered on the lawn, but the turf was surprisingly firm and pleasant to the tread.
We struck under the shade of the cypresses; through the systematic “wilderness” of planted trees we strode, toward the pretentious bridge, past the mouldering eighteenth-century summer-house, a thing quite dismantled and defeated and gutted out. Once I had fancied it as a possible hiding-place for mysterious visitants, but now I rejected it utterly. The old smooth lawns there were now ragged stretches of rough grass, still heavy with the rain where they lay beneath any trees, and sluggish lake-like ponds were the remains of once sparkling basins.
Aire paused where a grey fallen statue and its pedestal lay beside one of these sad meres, a place where the trees had hunched their shoulders together to make an extra twilight shade.