"Come along then," cried the other. "You're so slow; you can't make up your mind quickly, as I do." Comethup knew that the reproach was justified, and felt humbled accordingly. He was not altogether so happy in this adventure as he had been in all those which had preceded it. In the first place, he had to steal out of the house into the mysterious summer evening, being careful that no one saw him. His father was in church practising; he could hear the slow droning of the organ, like the hum of a gigantic tired insect going to sleep with the rest of the world. Comethup wished that he had gone into the church with his father, and sat there, out of the way of temptation such as this. The evening was warm and heavy, and a hundred sweet odours came from the gardens which fringed the road. Brian talked valiantly and loudly as they went along of how foolish it was to be afraid of anything, just because it happened to be dark, and of a hundred other matters tending to keep up his ebbing courage. Comethup was silent, doggedly determined to go through with the business, now that he had embarked upon it, and with a plaintive hope in his heart that it might not be so dreadful, after all. Curiously enough, that part of the outskirts of the town in which the house lay seemed always to be darker and more sombre-looking than any other. All the houses about there were very old, with high walls and tall, rustling old trees; with paths in their gardens which seemed always full of dead leaves and weeds at all times of the year. And that particular house was the most sombre and dismal-looking of them all. It had originally been a very fine house; there were the remains of carvings on the stone pillars which supported the gates. But everything was in decay; one of the great gates hung merely by one hinge, and swayed perilously when it was touched; the other stood permanently ajar. Their young hearts were beating very heavily when they reached the gates. A wind had risen, and was coming from the distant sea across the flat marshland; it stirred the trees and bent their long limbs, so that they seemed to point down at the two small, trembling figures, and to ask who they were, and to plot and whisper against them. Comethup and Brian gripped hands tightly as they slipped through the aperture between the gates. The wind seemed specially to haunt that place; it sent a dusty, whirling eddy of last year's leaves charging at them and fluttering about them as they went hesitatingly up the long drive. Brian stopped halfway to the house and pushed his cap back on his clustering hair with well-assumed carelessness, and said: "There's nothing to be seen; I don't think we'll go any farther. Besides, we ought to be home." Comethup kept steadily on up the drive. "I'm going up to the house," he said.