Page:War Drums (1928).pdf/37

 the foliage of the sycamore made a screen between him and the garden. Lachlan perched comfortably on the wall, his knees drawn up under his chin, his lean brown hands clasped about his ankles. He sat silent and motionless for many minutes, his eyes narrowed, his forehead wrinkled in a frown. At last his thin lips moved.

"Now here," he said to himself, "is Mystery."

He shifted his position slightly and looked up at the moon just rising above the trees. Yet, though he seemed to study the face of the moon, he did not see it, for his thoughts dwelt upon another face, one that perplexed and troubled him. For some moments he puzzled over the mystery of that face—a face which, beneath the scorn and anger that it had assumed, had revealed also unmistakable fear and a poignant, pitiful distress. Then his brow relaxed and he smiled—a smile of boyish, reckless abandon which obliterated in an instant the accustomed gravity of his lean, sharply chiselled face.

"I fought badly," he muttered, "but i'faith, I think I talked well. It is not every night that a Prince and a Chief of the Family of the Wind drops from high heaven into My Lady's garden."

A murmur of voices checked him. He sat bolt upright on the wall, listening; and in a moment he made sure that the voices were those of the lady and the young gallant whom she had called Richard.

The two came on slowly. Tall hawthorns hid them from him so that only once could he catch a gleam of