Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/203

Rh sunlight. That impassive and almost noiseless descent, with his engine silent, seemed to him like an aerial flight into some older and sleepier world. When a cushioning carpet of pine-needles finally brought him to a stop, he was satisfied to sit there, within twenty paces of a weather-bleached gate which marked a gap in the straggling undergrowth of cedar.

This gate, as a gate, challenged his attention. Yet he studied it for several minutes before reaching for his pack easel and thumb box and climbing down from his car-seat. Then he proceeded to inspect the gate at closer range. It was antiquated and uninviting and it sagged on one hinge. But beyond it, he found as he leaned across its moldering top bar, lay an arresting vista of checkered sunlight and cool green shadow centering in the warm red of a brick manor-house.

That glimpse of an unexpected old garden, cool and shadowy and secluded behind the sheltering cedars, held him so close that he overlooked the No Trespassing sign which semaphored so forbiddingly