culty, until there began to shine through the trees a level
light, in lines of silver, which he did not at first understand. The
next moment he had come out into the daylight at the top of a steep
bank, at the bottom of which a path ran round the rim of a large
ornamental lake. The sheet of water which he had seen shimmering
through the trees was of considerable extent, but was walled in on
every side with woods which were not only dark, but decidedly
dismal. At one end of the path was a classical statue of some
nameless nymph, and at the other end it was flanked by two classical
urns; but the marble was weather-stained and streaked with green and
gray. A hundred other signs, smaller but more significant, told him
that he had come on some outlying corner of the grounds neglected
and seldom visited. In the middle of the lake was what appeared to
be an island, and on the island what appeared to be meant for a
classical temple, not open like a temple of the winds, but with a
blank wall between its Doric pillars. We may say it only seemed like
an island, because a second glance revealed a low causeway of flat
stones running up to it from the shore and turning it into a
peninsula. And certainly it only seemed like a temple, for nobody
knew better than Horne Fisher that no god had ever dwelt in that
shrine.

"That's what makes all this classical landscape gardening so
desolate," he said to himself. "More desolate than Stonehenge or the
Pyramids. We don't believe in Egyptian mythology, but the Egyptians
did; and I suppose even the Druids believed in Druidism. But the
eighteenth-century gentleman who built these temples didn't believe
in Venus or Mercury any more than we do; that's why the reflection
of those pale pillars in the lake is truly only the shadow of a
shade. They were men of the age of Reason; they, who filled their
gardens with these stone nymphs, had less hope than any men in all
history of really meeting a nymph in the forest."

His monologue stopped abruptly with a sharp noise like a thundercrack
that rolled in dreary echoes round the dismal mere. He knew at once
what it was--somebody had fired off a gun. But as to the meaning of
it he was momentarily staggered, and strange thoughts thronged into
his mind. The next moment he laughed; for he saw lying a little way
along the path below him the dead bird that the shot had brought
down.

At the same moment, however, he saw something else, which interested
him m