winds, but with a blank wall between its Doric pillars. We may say it only
seemed like an island, because a second glance revealed a low causeway of
flat stones running up to it from the shore and turning it into a peninsula. And
certainly it only seemed like a temple, for nobody knew better than Horne
Fisher that no god had ever dwelt in that shrine.
"That's what makes all this classical landscape gardening so desolate," he
said to himself. "More desolate than Stonehenge or the Pyramids. We don't
believe in Egyptian mythology, but the Egyptians did; and I suppose even the
Druids believed in Druidism. But the eighteenth-century gentleman who built
these temples didn't believe in Venus or Mercury any more than we do; that's
why the reflection of those pale pillars in the lake is truly only the shadow of a
shade. They were men of the age of Reason; they, who filled their gardens
with these stone nymphs, had less hope than any men in all history of really
meeting a nymph in the forest."
His monologue stopped abruptly with a sharp noise like a thundercrack
that rolled in dreary echoes round the dismal mere. He knew at once what it
was—somebody had fired off a gun. But as to the meaning of it he was
momentarily staggered, and strange thoughts thronged into his mind. The next
moment he laughed; for he saw lying a little way along the path below him the
dead bird that the shot had brought down.
At the same moment, however, he saw something else, which interested
him more. A ring of dense trees ran round the back of the island temple,
framing the facade of it in dark foliage, and he could have sworn he saw a stir
as of something moving among the leaves. The next moment his suspicion
was confirmed, for a rather ragged figure came from under the shadow of the
temple and began to move along the causeway that led to the bank. Even at
that distance the figure was conspicuous by its great height and Fisher could
see that the man carried a gun under his arm. There came back into his
memory at once the name Long Adam, the poacher.
With a rapid sense of strategy he sometimes showed, Fisher sprang from
the bank and raced round the lake to the head of the little pier of stones. If
once a man reached the mainland he could easily vanish into the woods. But
when Fisher began to advance along the stones toward the island, the man was
cornered in a blind alley and could only back toward the temple. Putting his
broad shoulders against it, he stood as if at bay; he was a comparatively young
man, with fine lines in his lean face and figure and a mop of ragged red hair.
The look in his eyes might well have been disquieting to anyone left alone
with him on an island in the middle of a lake.
"Good morning," said Horne Fisher, pleasantly. "I thought at first you were
a murderer. But it seems unlikely, somehow, that the partridge rushed between