Page:Henry rideout--The siamese cat.djvu/82

 "It's a perfect stoke-hole," sighed Miss Holborow.

"You—you—w-would come!" gasped Aunt Julia. She jolted on, flushed, awry, patient, like a saint enduring the trials of both Mazeppa and Abed-nego. "You would c-come, L-Laura!"

"There!" cried the girl suddenly, as they swung round a bend.

Indeed, she was right to wonder; for before them, in a waste of fallen walls and broken spires, rose the ragged, tree-grown, pillared ruins of a temple; and among these, roofless, throned above climbing growth, sat the gigantic Buddha, outlined by incandescent gleams of bronze, smiling majestically from out his eternal thought. The walls rent and overthrown by the wild fig, "Splitter of sepulchres"; the year-long crumbling of stout prachadees; the green bush growing on the shoulder of the Holy