"It's a wall, I think.... I had almost run against it.... Yes, this must be the wall of Buttershall's garden."
"Certain. We have been bearing away to the right; people always do in a fog."
"Then if this really is Buttershall's garden--and I only hope and trust you are not mistaken--we can bear away from it to the left, on purpose, and then as likely as not we shall find ourselves going straight," reasoned Mrs. Pope, lucidly.
"My dear Charlotte"--Miss Gabriel was within an ace of calling her a fool--"if this is Buttershall's garden----"
"And so I am. Very well then; since this is Buttershall's garden, we have only to hold on by the wall and go forward, and that will take us----"
But here the wall ended, and the sentence with it.
"Are you hurt?... I said," asserted Mrs. Pope, desperately, and with conviction, "that one of us would break a limb before we finished."
"It seems to be--yes, it certainly is--a pump." Miss Gabriel's voice had begun to shake by this time, but she steadied it. "For the moment I--I half thought it might be a man."
"I would to heaven it were!" said Mrs. Pope, fervently.
"My dear Elizabeth, I mean it. And, what's more, I wouldn't care who he was. A pump? What earthly use is a pump? It must be Mumford's then, if it is a pump."
"For the simple reason that Mumford's is on the other side of the road."
"Then we _are_ on the other side of the road, as I have been maintaining all along."
"Would you mind walking round it?... Yes, you are right. It is Mumford's pump, for I have just bruised my wrist against the handle. Can you find the trough?"
"The astonishing thing to me," announced Mrs. Pope, groping her way with trepidation, "is that nobody shows a light. I don't like to call people unfeeling; but really, with folks in distress out at sea, and the guns firing, I wouldn't have believed such callousness."
They made the circuit of Mumford's pump, and assured themselves--for what the knowledge was worth--that it really was a pump, and Mumford's. But this cost them dear, for at the end of the circuit, or rather of a circuit and a half, they had lost all sense of their compass bearings.
"And after all," Mrs. Pope began afresh, her mind working sympathetically in a circle, "I don't understand what Mumford's pump is doing on the wrong side of the road."