his neck. Then cramming a soft cap on
his head (he noted with satisfaction that Bellward's hats fitted
him remarkably well) he opened the front door and stepped
outside.

The rain had stopped, but the whole atmosphere reeked of
moisture. Angry-looking, dirty-brown clouds chased each other
across the lowering sky, and there was a constant sound of water,
trickling and gurgling and splashing, in his ears.

An untidy-looking lawn with a few unkempt and overgrown
rhododendron bushes dotted here and there ran its length in front
of the house and terminated in an iron railing which separated
the grounds from a little wood. A badly water-logged drive, green
with grass in places, ran past the lawn in a couple of short
bends to the front gate. On the other side the drive was bordered
by what had once been a kitchen garden but was now a howling
wilderness of dead leaves, mud and gravel with withered bushes
and half a dozen black, bare and dripping apple trees set about
at intervals. At the side of the house the kitchen garden stopped
and was joined by a flower garden--at least so Desmond judged it
to have been by a half ruined pergola which he had noticed from
the drawing-room windows. Through the garden ran the mill-race
which poured out of the grounds through a field and under a
little bridge spanning the road outside.

Desmond followed the drive as far as the front gate. The
surrounding country was as flat as a pancake, and in almost every
field lay great glistening patches of water where the land had
been flooded by the incessant rain. The road on which the house
was built ran away on the left to the mist-shrouded horizon
without another building of any kind in sight. Desmond surmised
that Morstead Fen lay in the direction in which he was looking.
To the right, Desmond caught a glimpse of a ghostly spire
sticking out of some trees and guessed that this was Wentfield
Church. In front of him the distant roar of a passing train
showed where the Great Eastern Railway line lay.

More depressed than ever by the utter desolation of the scene,
Desmond turned to retrace his steps to the house. Noticing a path
traversing the kitchen garden, he followed it. It led to the back
of the house, to the door of a kind of lean-to shed. The latch
yielded on being pressed and Desmond entered the place.

He found himself in a fair-sized shed, very well and solidly
built of pitch-pine, with a glazed window looking out on the
garden, a tabl