still calling and waving their arms, appeared at the end
nearest the house. Edmund took Molly by the arm, and they ran to meet
the men.

"Get the lady over the kitchen-garden wall!" shouted one who held a gun,
and as they came to the end of the hedge on their left they saw a wall
at right angles to it about five feet high. Molly looked for any sort of
footing in the bricks for one second, and then she felt Grosse lift her
in his arms, and deposit her on the top of the wall. She rolled over on
the other side into a strawberry bed in blossom. She heard a gun fired
as she jumped to her feet, and a second shot followed.

"He's dead, sir," she heard a voice say. "I'll open the gate for the
lady."

And then a garden gate a few yards off was opened inward, and Molly
walked to meet the man whom she supposed to be a head gardener. She
thanked him and went through the gate, to find Edmund, with a very white
face, leaning back on a stone bench built into the wall.

"The gentleman strained himself a bit," said the gardener, in a tone of
apology to Molly. "I can't think how he come to break his chain"--he
meant the dog this time. "I've said he ought to be shot long ago; now
they'll believe me. Why, he bit off the porter's ear at the station when
he first come, and he was half mad with rage to-day."

"I'm all right," said Edmund, with a kindly smile to the horribly
distressed Molly. She went up to him with a gentle, tender anxiety on
her face that betrayed a too strong feeling, only he was just faint
enough not to notice it.

"It's nothing, child," he said in the fatherly tone that to Molly meant
so far too much. "The merest rick. I forgot, in the hurry, to think how
high I was lifting you, and I also forgot that there might be cucumber
frames on the other side!"

"I wouldn't have said 'over the garden wall,' sir, if there had been,"
said the gardener with a smile, as he offered a glass of water that had
been fetched by the other man, whose coat and gaiters proclaimed him
unmistakably a keeper.

"A fine dog, poor fellow," said Edmund to the latter.

The keeper shook his head. "I don't deny it, sir, but there are fine
lions and fine bears, too, sir, that are kept locked up in the
Zooelogical Gardens." Evidently the gardener and the keeper were of one
opinion in this matter.

Presently Sir Edmund was so clearly all right that the men, after being
tipped and having all their further offers of help refused, went away.

Edmu