Chum, bouncing up the stairs like an animated bundle of springs, met his master coming down. “Old man,” said the latter, “I don’t mind telling you that I’m beginning to be taken with this place. But it’s in a bad way, and it’s going to be put in shape. It’s a large order, and we’ll have to work like horses. Don’t you bother Aunt Daph! You just come with your Uncle Dudley. He’s going to take a look over the grounds.” He went to his trunk and fished out a soft shirt on which he knotted a loose tie, exchanged his Panama for a slouch hat, and whistling the barcarole [Pg 149]from Tales of Hoffmann, went gaily out. “I feel tremendously alive to-day,” he confided to the dog, as he tramped through the lush grass. “If you see me ladle the muck out of that fountain with my own fair hands, don’t have a fit. I’m liable to do anything.” His eye swept up and down the slope. “There probably isn’t a finer site for a house in the whole South,” he told himself. “The living-rooms front south and west. We’ll get scrumptious sunsets from that back porch. And on the other side there’s the view clear to the Blue Ridge. And as for this garden, no landscape artist need apply. The outlines are all here; it needs only to be put back. We’ll first rake out the rubbish, chop down that underbrush and trim the box. The shrubs only want pruning. Then we’ll mend the pool and set the fountain going and put in some goldfish. Flower-seeds and bulbs are cheap enough, I fancy. Just think of a bed of black and gold pansies running down to the lake! And on the other side a wilderness garden. I’ve seen pictures of them in the illustrated weeklies. Those rotten posts, under that snarl of vines, were a pergola. Any old carpenter can rebuild that—I can draw the plans myself.” He skirted the lake. “Only to grub out some of the lilies—there’s too many of them—and straighten the rim—and weed the pebble margin [Pg 150]to give those green rocks a show. I’ll build a little wharf below them to dive from, and—yes, I’ll stock it with spotted trout. Not just to yank out with a barbed hook, but to make it inhabited. How well a couple of white swans would look preening in the shade out there! The roof’s gone from that oval summer-house, but it’s no trick to put another on.” He penetrated farther into the tangle and came out into a partially cleared space shaded with great trees, where the grass was matted with clover into a thick rug, sprinkled with designs worked in bluebells and field-daisies, with here and there a flaunting poppy, like a scarlet medallion. He was but a few hundred yards from the house, yet the silence was so deep that there might have been no habitation within fifty miles. All at once he stopped short; there was a sudden movement in the thicket beyond—the sound of light fast footfalls, as of some one running away.