“Up the bank, did it go?”
I flashed the torch up and down both sides of us. On the one hand was a miniature precipice more than ten feet high, on the other was a wall of earth nearly vertical, thickly grown with ivy-leaved toad-flax showing no sign that anything larger than a mite had travelled over it.
“I never—” Aire began.
I could not repress a tremor when he suddenly looked skyward, showing that the spell of magic could exist in his bones. I turned my gaze up, too, as if I really expected to see a black-robed figure floating over the ruined summer-house or receding into the depths of the night sky. But it was eastward that Aire was looking, and while we stared, some solitary winged form flapped across the narrow surface of the moon.
“We’re beaten,” said Aire.
“Let’s get out of here. I need a tonic.”
“Shall we go back?”
“No; I’ll give you a leg up, and you reach down a hand to me.”
In this wise we crawled up the toad-flax, and a minute later our wet feet were taking us back toward the cypress grove again. I kept my light running along the ground, though my hope was feeble of discovering any traces of the unknown. But when we had reached the grove itself, Aire darted forward with a chortling cry.
No need to tell me what the white thing was that he picked up and held in a trembling hand. He tried to decipher it in the moonlight before my torch made the letters clear: