It was a six-foot drop, but he came down noiselessly into a bed of moss. Once more he paused to listen. There was no sound save the burring of some night insect over his head. Stealthily, and keeping in the shadow of the trees, he began to climb the grassy avenue towards the château. CHAPTER XXIII A PASSIONATE PILGRIM It seemed to Wrayson, as by and by he began to make bolder and more rapid progress, that it was an actual fairy world into which he was passing with beating heart and this strange new sense of delicious excitement. As he drew nearer, the round Norman towers and immense grey front of the château began to take to themselves more definite shape. The gardens began to spread themselves out; terraced lawns, from whose flower-beds, now a blurred chaos so far as colour was concerned, waves of perfume came stealing down to him; statuary appeared, white and ghostly in the half light, and here and there startlingly lifelike; there were trimmed shrubs, and a long wall of roses trailed down from the high stone balcony. But, as yet, there was no sound or sign of human life! That was to come. Wrayson came to a pause at last. He had passed from the shelter of the woods into a laurel walk, but further than this he could not go without being plainly visible to any one in the château. So he waited and watched. There were lights, he could see now, behind many of the ground floor windows of the chateâu, and more than once he fancied that he could catch the sound of music. He tried to fancy in which room she was, to project his passionate will through the twilight, so that she should come to him. But the curtains remained undrawn, and the windows closed. Still Wrayson waited! Then at last Providence intervened. Above the top of the woods, over on the other side of the château, came first a faint lightening in the sky, which gradually deepened into a glow. Slowly the rim of the moon crept up, and very soon the spectral twilight was at an end. The shadowy landscape became real and vivid. It was a new splendour creeping softly into the night. Wrayson moved a little further back into his shelter, and even as he did so one of the lower windows of the château was thrown open, and two women, followed by a man, stepped out. Their appearance was so sudden that Wrayson felt his breath almost taken away. He leaned a little forward and watched them eagerly.