Lady Beach-Mandarin having paused a moment or so upon the verandah admiring the garden as a whole, now prepared to go into details. She gathered her ample skirts together and advanced into the midst of the large lawn, with very much of the effect of a fleet of captive balloons dragging their anchors. Mr. Brumley followed, as it were in attendance upon her and Lady Harman. Miss Sharsper, after one last hasty glance at the room, rather like the last hasty glance of a still unprepared schoolboy at his book, came behind with her powers of observation strainingly alert. Mr. Brumley was aware of a brief mute struggle between the two ladies of title. It was clear that Lady Harman would have had them go to the left, to where down a vista of pillar roses a single large specimen cypress sounded a faint but recognizable Italian note, and he did his loyal best to support her, but Lady Beach-Mandarin’s attraction to that distant clump of lilac on the right was equally great and much more powerful. She flowed, a great and audible tide of socially influential womanhood, across the green spaces of the garden, and drew the others with her. And it seemed to Mr. Brumley—not that he believed his eyes—that beyond those lilacs something ran out, something black that crouched close to the ground and went very swiftly. It flashed like an arrow across a further space of flower-bed, dropped to the ground, became two agitatedly receding boot soles and was gone. Had it ever been? He glanced at Lady Harman, but she was looking back with the naïve anxiety of a hostess to her cypress,—at Lady Beach-Mandarin, but she was proliferating compliments and decorative scrolls and flourishes like the engraved frontispiece to a seventeenth-century book. “I know I’m inordinately curious,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin, “but gardens are my Joy. I want to go into every corner of this. Peep into everything. And I feel somehow”—and here she urged a smile on Lady Harman’s attention—“that I shan’t begin to know _you_, until I know all your environment.” She turned the flank of the lilacs as she said these words and advanced in echelon with a stately swiftness upon the laurels beyond. Lady Harman said there was nothing beyond but sycamores and the fence, but Lady Beach-Mandarin would press on through a narrow path that pierced the laurel hedge, in order, she said, that she might turn back and get the whole effect of the grounds. And so it was they discovered the mushroom shed. “A mushroom shed!” cried Lady Beach-Mandarin. “And if we look in—shall we see hosts and regiments of mushrooms? I must—I must.” “I _think_ it is locked,” said Lady Harman. Mr. Brumley darted forward; tried the door and turned quickly. “It’s locked,” he said and barred Lady Beach-Mandarin’s advance. “And besides,” said Lady Harman, “there’s no mushrooms there. They won’t come up. It’s one of my husband’s—annoyances.”