st 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 naive 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 Harma