slope. The first to sit up was the little priest, who scratched
his head with a face of foolish wonder. Frank Harrogate heard him say to
himself: "Now why on earth have we fallen just here?"

He blinked at the litter around him, and recovered his own very clumsy
umbrella. Beyond it lay the broad sombrero fallen from the head of
Muscari, and beside it a sealed business letter which, after a glance
at the address, he returned to the elder Harrogate. On the other side of
him the grass partly hid Miss Ethel's sunshade, and just beyond it lay a
curious little glass bottle hardly two inches long. The priest picked it
up; in a quick, unobtrusive manner he uncorked and sniffed it, and his
heavy face turned the colour of clay.

"Heaven deliver us!" he muttered; "it can't be hers! Has her sorrow come
on her already?" He slipped it into his own waistcoat pocket. "I think
I'm justified," he said, "till I know a little more."

He gazed painfully at the girl, at that moment being raised out of the
flowers by Muscari, who was saying: "We have fallen into heaven; it is
a sign. Mortals climb up and they fall down; but it is only gods and
goddesses who can fall upwards."

And indeed she rose out of the sea of colours so beautiful and happy
a vision that the priest felt his suspicion shaken and shifted. "After
all," he thought, "perhaps the poison isn't hers; perhaps it's one of
Muscari's melodramatic tricks."

Muscari set the lady lightly on her feet, made her an absurdly
theatrical bow, and then, drawing his cutlass, hacked hard at the taut
reins of the horses, so that they scrambled to their feet and stood
in the grass trembling. When he had done so, a most remarkable thing
occurred. A very quiet man, very poorly dressed and extremely sunburnt,
came out of the bushes and took hold of the horses' heads. He had a
queer-shaped knife, very broad and crooked, buckled on his belt; there
was nothing else remarkable about him, except his sudden and silent
appearance. The poet asked him who he was, and he did not answer.

Looking around him at the confused and startled group in the hollow,
Muscari then perceived that another tanned and tattered man, with a
short gun under his arm, was looking at them from the ledge just below,
leaning his elbows on the edge of the turf. Then he looked up at the
road from which they had fallen and saw, looking down on them, the
muzzles of four other carbines and four other brown faces with bright
but quite