ck behind him, under a shrub, and he began to
make his way up the half-bare branches of the gnarled cedar. They bore
him well, without crack or rustle, and the way was very easy. No ladder
made by man could have offered a much simpler ascent. So, mounting
slowly and with care, his head came level with the top of the wall. He
climbed to the next branch, a foot higher, and rested there. The
drooping foliage from the upper part of the cedar-tree, which was still
alive, hung down over him and cloaked him from view, but through its
aromatic screen he could see as freely as through the window curtain in
the rue d'Assas.

The house lay before him, a little to the left and perhaps a hundred
yards away. It was a disappointing house to find in that great
enclosure, for though it was certainly neither small nor trivial, it was
as certainly far from possessing anything like grandeur. It had been in
its day a respectable, unpretentious square structure of three stories,
entirely without architectural beauty, but also entirely without the
ornate hideousness of the modern villas along the route de Clamart. Now,
however, the stucco was gone in great patches from its stone walls,
giving them an unpleasantly diseased look, and long neglect of all
decent cares had lent the place the air almost of desertion. Anciently
the grounds before the house had been laid out in the formal fashion
with a terrace and geometrical lawns and a pool and a fountain and a
rather fine, long vista between clipped larches, but the same neglect
which had made shabby the stuccoed house had allowed grass and weeds to
grow over the gravel paths, underbrush to spring up and to encroach upon
the geometrical turf-plots, the long double row of clipped larches to
flourish at will or to die or to fall prostrate and lie where they had
fallen.

So all the broad enclosure was a scene of heedless neglect, a riot of
unrestrained and wanton growth, where should have been decorous and
orderly beauty. It was a sight to bring tears to a gardener's eyes, but
it had a certain untamed charm of its own, for all that. The very riot
of it, the wanton prodigality of untouched natural growth, produced an
effect that was by no means all disagreeable.

An odd and whimsical thought came into Ste. Marie's mind that thus must
have looked the garden and park round the castle of the sleeping beauty
when the prince came to wake her.

But sleeping beauties and unkempt grounds went from him in