but what had startled the
girl was the discovery of several spear-blades protruding from the mass
of foliage. She had made them out suddenly. They did not gleam, but she
saw them with extreme distinctness, very still, very vicious to look at.

"You had better let me go forward alone, Lena," said Heyst.

She tugged, persistently at his arm, but after a time, during which
he never ceased to look smilingly into her terrified eyes, he ended by
disengaging himself.

"It's a sign rather than a demonstration," he argued, persuasively.
"Just wait here a moment. I promise not to approach near enough to be
stabbed."

As in a nightmare she watched Heyst go up the few yards of the path as
if he never meant to stop; and she heard his voice, like voices heard
in dreams, shouting unknown words in an unearthly tone. Heyst was only
demanding to see Wang. He was not kept waiting very long. Recovering
from the first flurry of her fright, Lena noticed a commotion in the
green top-dressing of the barricade. She exhaled a sigh of relief when
the spear-blades retreated out of sight, sliding inward--the horrible
things! in a spot facing Heyst a pair of yellow hands parted the leaves,
and a face filled the small opening--a face with very noticeable eyes.
It was Wang's face, of course, with no suggestion of a body belonging to
it, like those cardboard faces at which she remembered gazing as a child
in the window of a certain dim shop kept by a mysterious little man in
Kingsland Road. Only this face, instead of mere holes, had eyes which
blinked. She could see the beating of the eyelids. The hands on each
side of the face, keeping the boughs apart, also did not look as if they
belonged to any real body. One of them was holding a revolver--a weapon
which she recognized merely by intuition, never having seen such an
object before.

She leaned her shoulders against the rock of the perpendicular hillside
and kept her eyes on Heyst, with comparative composure, since the spears
were not menacing him any longer. Beyond the rigid and motionless back
he presented to her, she saw Wang's unreal cardboard face moving its
thin lips and grimacing artificially. She was too far down the path to
hear the dialogue, carried on in an ordinary voice. She waited patiently
for its end. Her shoulders felt the warmth of the rock; now and then a
whiff of cooler air seemed to slip down upon her head from above; the
ravine at her feet, choked full of vegetation, emitt