o shift along the wall in the direction by which they had
come, doubling on their tracks to throw off the last pursuit. MacIan
could not rid himself of the fancy of bestriding a steed; the long, grey
coping of the wall shot out in front of him, like the long, grey neck of
some nightmare Rosinante. He had the quaint thought that he and Turnbull
were two knights on one steed on the old shield of the Templars.

The nightmare of the stone horse was increased by the white fog, which
seemed thicker inside the wall than outside. They could make nothing of
the enclosure upon which they were partial trespassers, except that the
green and crooked branches of a big apple-tree came crawling at them out
of the mist, like the tentacles of some green cuttlefish. Anything would
serve, however, that was likely to confuse their trail, so they both
decided without need of words to use this tree also as a ladder--a
ladder of descent. When they dropped from the lowest branch to the
ground their stockinged feet felt hard gravel beneath them.

They had alighted in the middle of a very broad garden path, and the
clearing mist permitted them to see the edge of a well-clipped lawn.
Though the white vapour was still a veil, it was like the gauzy veil
of a transformation scene in a pantomime; for through it there glowed
shapeless masses of colour, masses which might be clouds of sunrise
or mosaics of gold and crimson, or ladies robed in ruby and emerald
draperies. As it thinned yet farther they saw that it was only flowers;
but flowers in such insolent mass and magnificence as can seldom be seen
out of the tropics. Purple and crimson rhododendrons rose arrogantly,
like rampant heraldic animals against their burning background of
laburnum gold. The roses were red hot; the clematis was, so to speak,
blue hot. And yet the mere whiteness of the syringa seemed the most
violent colour of all. As the golden sunlight gradually conquered the
mists, it had really something of the sensational sweetness of the slow
opening of the gates of Eden. MacIan, whose mind was always haunted
with such seraphic or titanic parallels, made some such remark to his
companion. But Turnbull only cursed and said that it was the back garden
of some damnable rich man.

When the last haze had faded from the ordered paths, the open lawns,
and the flaming flower-beds, the two realized, not without an abrupt
re-examination of their position, that they were not alone in the
garden.