The windows of Tree-Tops were latticed. The roof was thatched. It was no more than a converted cottage. It blinked at you as though it wore spectacles. Behind it ran a Roman road, buried deep in the leaves of centuries. On the brow of the hill was a legionaries' camp. To show where the road ended a white cross had been cut, by turning back the sod from the underlying chalk. Gathered about the camp in a half-circle, spreading back for miles through uplands, was a beech-forest whose leaves fluttered like green butterflies crucified on boughs of silver. Clouds trailed slowly over it, or hung snared in its topmost branches. Over the shoulder of the hill, immediately behind the Faun Man's house, lay a golf-course with vivid squares of close-cropped turf from which red flags waved angrily as poppies. Across the valley shone fields of mustard, like sunlight falling in sudden patches. The Faun Man puzzled Curious Corner. The village might have been named in prophecy of his advent, with such extraordinary oddness did he conduct his household. Like birds hopping in and out of a hedge, his visitors came and went without knocking. Nobody tried to explain anybody; no one at Tree-Tops thought explanation necessary. The women were young and dashing; certainly they were not married to the men. If they were wicked--which was never proved--they were decidedly light-hearted. By day they played golf and rode horseback. By night they sat in the terraced garden, where fragrances wandered like old, sweet memories; there, to the tinkling of banjos and mandolins, they sang till dusk had brimmed the valleys and the moon sailed solitary. When their laughter had grown tired, a light would spring up in a room beneath the thatch where the Faun Man worked. Sometimes it would outstay the dawn. The villagers watched these doings from a distance. They wagged their heads. But if Tree-Tops had the reputation for being wild, there could be no doubt that its master had money. He drove a four-in-hand from Oxford to London. He rode a horse called Satan, which no one could manage; it had killed two men already. And the money! He coined it with his pen--so it was reported. But the inhabitants of Curious Corner never guessed the motive of all this frivolity: that the Faun Man wasn't really living--was only distracting himself, till a woman with golden hair should nod, when life would commence.