“I know a globe-trotter mustn’t be fastidious,” replied Mr. Paynter.  “But I repeat firmly, an objection to eating people.  The peacock trees seem to have progressed since the happy days of innocence when they only ate peacocks.  If you ask the people here—­the fisherman who lives on that beach, or the man that mows this very lawn in front of us—­they’ll tell you tales taller than any tropical one I brought you from the Barbary Coast.  If you ask them what happened to the fisherman Peters, who got drunk on All Hallows Eve, they’ll tell you he lost his way in that little wood, tumbled down asleep under the wicked trees, and then—­evaporated, vanished, was licked up like dew by the sun.  If you ask them where Harry Hawke is, the widow’s little son, they’ll just tell you he’s swallowed; that he was dared to climb the trees and sit there all night, and did it.  What the trees did God knows; the habits of a vegetable ogre leave one a little vague.  But they even add the agreeable detail that a new branch appears on the tree when somebody has petered out in this style.”

“What new nonsense is this?” cried Vane.  “I know there’s some crazy yarn about the trees spreading fever, though every educated man knows why these epidemics return occasionally.  And I know they say you can tell the noise of them among other trees in a gale, and I dare say you can.  But even Cornwall isn’t a lunatic asylum, and a tree that dines on a passing tourist—­”

“Well, the two tales are reconcilable enough,” put in the poet quietly.  “If there were a magic that killed men when they came close, it’s likely to strike them with sickness when they stand far off.  In the old romance the dragon, that devours people, often blasts others with a sort of poisonous breath.”

Ashe looked across at the speaker steadily, not to say stonily.

“Do I understand,” he inquired, “that you swallow the swallowing trees too?”

Treherne’s dark smile was still on the defensive; his fencing always annoyed the other, and he seemed not without malice in the matter.

“Swallowing is a metaphor,” he said, “about me, if not about the trees.  And metaphors take us at once into dreamland—­no bad place, either.  This garden, I think, gets more and more like a dream at this corner of the day and night, that might lead us anywhere.”

The yellow horn of the moon had appeared silently and as if suddenly over the black horns of the seaweed, seeming to announce as night something which till then had been evening.  A night breeze came in between the trees and raced stealthily across the turf, and as they ceased speaking they heard, not only the seething grass, but the sea itself move and sound in all the cracks and caves round them and below them and on every side.  They all felt the note that had been struck—­ the American as an art critic and the poet as a poet; and the Squire, who believed himself boiling with an impatience purely rational, did not really understand his own impatience.  In him, more perhaps than the others—­more certainly than he knew himself—­the sea wind went to the head like wine.