He was leading through the riot of untended flowers, Armstrong close behind him, when he stopped suddenly, and in a tone of voice involuntarily subdued, asked--
"What?" said Armstrong, starting in spite of himself.
"A figure--something--I don’t know; at the back of the room."
The sunlight, slanting from the south-east, shone full upon the cottage, but left the back of one of the rooms on the ground floor shadowed by the screen of creepers falling over the gaping window.
"Well, suppose there was, why the mysterious whisper?" said Armstrong, his own doubts and remembered tremors disposing him to ridicule Pratt’s excitement. "Why shouldn’t there be some one there? _We_ are here--why not others?"
"Yes, but--well, I didn’t expect it. Perhaps you did."
"It may have been only the shadow of the creeper on the wall."
"It may have been your grandmother! Let’s get into the place and have a look round. The window’s too high to climb; is the door open?"
They hastened to the front, and through the doorway into the hall. The house was silent as a tomb. On either side opened a doorless room. They entered the one on the right--that in which Pratt had believed he saw a moving figure. It was pervaded by a subdued greenish sunlight, becoming misty by reason of the dust their footsteps had stirred up. It held neither person nor thing. They crossed to the opposite room, which, being out of the sunshine, was in deep gloom. This, too, was empty. Passing the staircase they arrived at the back premises, a stone-flagged kitchen and scullery. Both were bare; even the grate had been removed.
"Now for upstairs," said Pratt. "They’ve made a clean sweep down here."
They mounted the staircase, at first treading carefully, then with confident steps as they found that the creaking stairs were sound. There were four rooms on the upper storey, two of them exposed to the sky. Of these the floors were thick with blown leaves, twigs, birds’ feathers, fragments of tiles and bricks, broken rafters, and the debris of the ceiling. The other two, roofed and whole, were as bare as the rooms below. Through the empty casement of one they caught sight of the tower in the grounds of Mr. Ambrose Pratt’s house, and the upper windows and roof of the house itself. Pratt’s appreciative eye was instantly seized by the prospect--the foreground of low thicket; the glistening stream; the noble trees beyond, springing out of a waving sea of sun-dappled bracken; the gentle slope on whose summit stood the buildings, and in the far background the rolling expanse of purple moorland. For the moment he forgot the shadowy figure he had seen, and lingered as if unwilling to miss one detail of the enchanting landscape.