h, but made no particular reply.

'Come, let us move on. I don't like intruding into other people's
grounds like this,' De Stancy continued.

'We are not intruding. Anybody walks outside this fence.' He indicated
an iron railing newly tarred, dividing the wilder underwood amid which
they stood from the inner and well-kept parts of the shrubbery, and
against which the back of the gymnasium was built.

Light footsteps upon a gravel walk could be heard on the other side of
the fence, and a trio of cloaked and umbrella-screened figures were
for a moment discernible. They vanished behind the gymnasium; and again
nothing resounded but the river murmurs and the clock-like drippings of
the leafage.

'Hush!' said Dare.

'No pranks, my boy,' said De Stancy suspiciously. 'You should be above
them.'

'And you should trust to my good sense, captain,' Dare remonstrated. 'I
have not indulged in a prank since the sixth year of my pilgrimage. I
have found them too damaging to my interests. Well, it is not too dry
here, and damp injures your health, you say. Have a pull for safety's
sake.' He presented a flask to De Stancy.

The artillery officer looked down at his nether garments.

'I don't break my rule without good reason,' he observed.

'I am afraid that reason exists at present.'

'I am afraid it does. What have you got?'

'Only a little wine.'

'What wine?'

'Do try it. I call it "the blushful Hippocrene," that the poet describes
as

"Tasting of Flora and the country green;
Dance, and Provencal song, and sun-burnt mirth."'

De Stancy took the flask, and drank a little.

'It warms, does it not?' said Dare.

'Too much,' said De Stancy with misgiving. 'I have been taken unawares.
Why, it is three parts brandy, to my taste, you scamp!'

Dare put away the wine. 'Now you are to see something,' he said.

'Something--what is it?' Captain De Stancy regarded him with a puzzled
look.

'It is quite a curiosity, and really worth seeing. Now just look in
here.'

The speaker advanced to the back of the building, and withdrew the wood
billet from the wall.

'Will, I believe you are up to some trick,' said De Stancy,
not, however, suspecting the actual truth in these unsuggestive
circumstances, and with a comfortable resignation, produced by the
potent liquor, which would have been comical to an outsider, but which,
to one who had known the history and relationship of the two speakers,
would have worn a sad