trunk."

"Why do you want us to go inside?" asked Arthur Inglewood,
in whose red brow and rough brown hair botheration seemed
to have reached its limit.

"I want the rest to go in," said Michael in a clear voice,
"because I want the whole of this garden in which to talk to you."

There was an atmosphere of irrational doubt; it was really getting colder,
and a night wind had begun to wave the one or two trees in the twilight.
Dr. Warner, however, spoke in a voice devoid of indecision.

"I refuse to listen to any such proposal," he said; "you have lost
this ruffian, and I must find him."

"I don't ask you to listen to any proposal," answered Moon quietly;
"I only ask you to listen."

He made a silencing movement with his hand, and immediately
the whistling noise that had been lost in the dark streets on one side
of the house could be heard from quite a new quarter on the other side.
Through the night-maze of streets the noise increased with incredible
rapidity, and the next moment the flying hoofs and flashing wheels had
swept up to the blue-railed gate at which they had originally stood.
Mr. Smith got down from his perch with an air of absent-mindedness,
and coming back into the garden stood in the same elephantine
attitude as before.

"Get inside! get inside!" cried Moon hilariously, with the air
of one shooing a company of cats. "Come, come, be quick about it!
Didn't I tell you I wanted to talk to Inglewood?"

How they were all really driven into the house again it would
have been difficult afterwards to say. They had reached the point
of being exhausted with incongruities, as people at a farce
are ill with laughing, and the brisk growth of the storm among
the trees seemed like a final gesture of things in general.
Inglewood lingered behind them, saying with a certain amicable
exasperation, "I say, do you really want to speak to me?"

"I do," said Michael, "very much."

Night had come as it generally does, quicker than the twilight had seemed
to promise. While the human eye still felt the sky as light gray, a very
large and lustrous moon appearing abruptly above a bulk of roofs and trees,
proved by contrast that the sky was already a very dark gray indeed.
A drift of barren leaves across the lawn, a drift of riven clouds across
the sky, seemed to be lifted on the same strong and yet laborious wind.

"Arthur," said Michael, "I began with an intuition; but now I am sure.
You and I are going to defend th