garden gate, while the almost wailing voice of Pym still followed him:
"But really the bullet missed you by several feet." And another voice added:
"The bullet missed him by several years."

There was a long and mainly unmeaning silence, and then
Moon said suddenly, "We have been sitting with a ghost.
Dr. Herbert Warner died years ago."

Chapter V

How the Great Wind Went
from Beacon House

Mary was walking between Diana and Rosamund slowly up and down the garden;
they were silent, and the sun had set. Such spaces of daylight as remained
open in the west were of a warm-tinted white, which can be compared
to nothing but a cream cheese; and the lines of plumy cloud that ran
across them had a soft but vivid violet bloom, like a violet smoke.
All the rest of the scene swept and faded away into a dove-like gray,
and seemed to melt and mount into Mary's dark-gray figure until she seemed
clothed with the garden and the skies. There was something in these last
quiet colours that gave her a setting and a supremacy; and the twilight,
which concealed Diana's statelier figure and Rosamund's braver array,
exhibited and emphasized her, leaving her the lady of the garden, and alone.

When they spoke at last it was evident that a conversation long
fallen silent was being revived.

"But where is your husband taking you?" asked Diana in her practical voice.

"To an aunt," said Mary; "that's just the joke. There really
is an aunt, and we left the children with her when I arranged
to be turned out of the other boarding-house down the road.
We never take more than a week of this kind of holiday,
but sometimes we take two of them together."

"Does the aunt mind much?" asked Rosamund innocently. "Of course,
I dare say it's very narrow-minded and--what's that other word?--
you know, what Goliath was--but I've known many aunts who would
think it--well, silly."

"Silly?" cried Mary with great heartiness. "Oh, my Sunday hat!
I should think it was silly! But what do you expect?
He really is a good man, and it might have been snakes or something."

"Snakes?" inquired Rosamund, with a slightly puzzled interest.

"Uncle Harry kept snakes, and said they loved him," replied Mary
with perfect simplicity. "Auntie let him have them in his pockets,
but not in the bedroom."

"And you--" began Diana, knitting her dark brows a little.

"Oh, I do as auntie did,