He was gazing gravely through his spectacles over their heads into vacancy, and suddenly he smiled.

“Ah,” he cried, jumping up from the rock with alacrity, “here is the amateur detective at last!”

Ashe turned his head over his shoulder, and for a few seconds did not move it again, but stood as if with a stiff neck.  In the cliff just behind him was one of the clefts or cracks into which it was everywhere cloven.  Advancing from this into the sunshine, as if from a narrow door, was Squire Vane, with a broad smile on his face.

The wind was tearing from the top of the high cliff out to sea, passing over their heads, and they had the sensation that everything was passing over their heads and out of their control.  Paynter felt as if his head had been blown off like a hat.  But none of this gale of unreason seemed to stir a hair on the white head of the Squire, whose bearing, though self-important and bordering on a swagger, seemed if anything more comfortable than in the old days.  His red face was, however, burnt like a sailor’s, and his light clothes had a foreign look.

“Well, gentlemen,” he said genially, “so this is the end of the legend of the peacock trees.  Sorry to spoil that delightful traveler’s tale, Mr. Paynter, but the joke couldn’t be kept up forever.  Sorry to put a stop to your best poem, Mr. Treherne, but I thought all this poetry had been going a little too far.  So Doctor Brown and I fixed up a little surprise for you.  And I must say, without vanity, that you look a little surprised.”

“What on earth,” asked Ashe at last, “is the meaning of all this?”

The Squire laughed pleasantly, and even a little apologetically,

“I’m afraid I’m fond of practical jokes,” he said, “and this I suppose is my last grand practical joke.  But I want you to understand that the joke is really practical.  I flatter myself it will be of very practical use to the cause of progress and common sense, and the killing of such superstitions everywhere.  The best part of it, I admit, was the doctor’s idea and not mine.  All I meant to do was to pass a night in the trees, and then turn up as fresh as paint to tell you what fools you were.  But Doctor Brown here followed me into the wood, and we had a little talk which rather changed my plans.  He told me that a disappearance for a few hours like that would never knock the nonsense on the head; most people would never even hear of it, and those who did would say that one night proved nothing.  He showed me a much better way, which had been tried in several cases where bogus miracles had been shown up.  The thing to do was to get the thing really believed everywhere as a miracle, and then shown up everywhere as a sham miracle.  I can’t put all the arguments as well as he did, but that was the notion, I think.”

The doctor nodded, gazing silently at the sand; and the Squire resumed with undiminished relish.