At the back of the lodge stood a crazy porch of rustic woodwork, and therefrom a door, lolling on broken hinges, gave access to the interior of the building. There was a gap here sufficient for the entrance of a man, and he went through it swiftly, and along a stone-paved passage beyond, that was dumb with dust and littered with flaked rags of plaster and crackling wall-paper. So he made his way to a front room that looked upon the drive; and here he paused with a certain measure of astonishment. For on some mouldering shelves that spanned a recess by the chimney, lay in orderly arrangement of ugliness Darda’s banished museum of curiosities. “So-ho!” he breathed. “This is how the law is evaded.” He nodded to himself with set lips, and moved to the window. In the moment of his doing so, a low crooning voice broke upon his ears, and the fantastic figure of the girl herself came out from amongst the trees opposite and stood in a shaft of sunlight that broke from above into that luminous well of leafiness. She smiled and sang, making a harmony of weird discords; and throwing her head back, with her hands beneath, it received the touch of the sun upon her mouth, and seemed to return it with a fond little sound of kissing. She was so near to him, that he could see the pulse in her throat fluttering like a bird’s as she murmured her strange music--could note every movement of the spirit that rose from her heart to her lips. Suddenly she was silent, and gazing before her, dropped an odd little curtsey and stood still. Mr. Joseph Corby had, it appeared, come down the drive and was slouching into view. He stopped before the girl; yet not, it seemed, as one who was altogether unacquainted with her or ignorant of her reputation; for he stood at gaze with some expression of hilarity, but none of wonder upon his face. “That’s right, missy,” he said. “Drink the sun, like the new wine it is for a merry maid. It’s yaller, for youth, as is cowslips and buttercupses and pretty gildilocks; but give me the old red of Oporto for a seasoned skin, and a ship’s bucket of it to drink against bed-time.” Darda laughed shrilly. “You could swallow a lake of it, I expect,” said she, “like the troll in the fairy tale.” “That’s it,” he said, “a lake of wine.” He came quite close to the girl, and advanced his red face so that his injected eyes looked full into hers. “A lake of wine,” he repeated. “Have you ever heard tell of one?” She shook her head smiling. “Come now,” said the man--and the watcher saw his jovial face suddenly assume a very evil and menacing look. “Have you ever heard of one, I say? You’d better answer.” Again she shook her head. “You must know, you know,” said the fellow, his eyes staring and his mouth creasing at the corners. “You ain’t a lively sucker o’ the old stem and growed up here all these years not to have heard on it. What is it, I say? What’s become o’ the Lake of Wine?”