“I know her,” I said.  “I met her in the woods yesterday.”

“That explains; though I call it an infernal shame you didn’t tell.  I rowed across to find out what ailed her:  she stood waving her arms so, and crying—­like a child in distress.  When I came near she called on to me to stop.  ‘Not you,’ she said, ’the little boy!  Where is the little boy?’ I told her that we had a boy on board, but that just now you were off on a cruise; and with that she turned right about, and ran up through the woods and out of sight; but for some way I could hear her crying and calling out just as before:  ‘The little boy!’ it was; ’Where is the little boy?’—­meaning you, I suppose.”

We were now come to the foot of the first waterfall, an obvious cul de sac for a party which included two ladies and a sick man on a litter.  I stood gazing up at the wet, slippery rocks by which I had made my ascent yesterday, and searching in vain for a more practicable path.  Dr. Beauregard halted and turned upon me with a smile.

“A moment,” said he, “and you will grant that my privacy is rather neatly protected.  But first”—­he pointed to the water pouring past us from the pool beneath the fall—­“you may remark that the stream here has more than twice the volume of the stream you see coming down the rocks.”

I looked.  The difference was plain enough, and I had been a fool in failing to observe it.

“The reason being,” he went on, “that a second and larger stream flows into the pool under the very stones on which you are standing.  I myself laid that channel for it, almost ten years ago, and Nature has very kindly helped to disguise it.  Now, if you will follow me—­”

He drew aside a mat of creepers overhanging a bush to the left of the path, and, stooping, disappeared into a dim, green tunnel, so artfully contrived that even without its curtain of creepers it suggested no more than a chance gap in the undergrowth.  The tunnel zigzagged twice at a sharp angle, and then, quite suddenly, the dimness changed to warm sunlight, and we emerged at his heels upon a prospect that well excused my gasp of astonishment.

We stood at the lower end of a smooth, green glade, through which a broad stream—­a river, almost—­came swirling, its murmur drowned in the thunder of the waterfall behind us, which the bushes now concealed.  The glade was, in fact, a valley-bottom, thinned of undergrowth and set with tall trees; and the stream such a stream as tumbles through many an English deer-park.  The whole scene might have been transplanted from England but for a wall of naked cliff, sharply serrated, which enclosed the valley on the left.  And under it, like a smooth military terrace at the foot of a fortress, the glade curved upward and out of sight.

The scene, I have said, was almost typically English—­but to the eye only.

“Faugh!” exclaimed Miss Belcher, looking about her and sniffing suspiciously.  “A pretty place enough, but full of malaria, or I’m a Dutchwoman!  And what a horrible silence!”