quiet tribe of trees.  But they say that when spring came all the other trees put forth leaves, but this put forth feathers of a strange hue and pattern.  And by that monstrous assimilation the saint knew of the sin, and he rooted that one tree to the earth with a judgment, so that evil should fall on any who removed it again.  That, Squire, is the beginning in the deserts of the tale that ended here, almost in this garden.”

“And the end is about as reliable as the beginning, I should say,” said Vane.  “Yours is a nice plain tale for a small tea-party; a quiet little bit of still-life, that is.”

“What a queer, horrible story,” exclaimed Barbara.  “It makes one feel like a cannibal.”

“Ex Africa,” said the lawyer, smiling.  “It comes from a cannibal country.  I think it’s the touch of the tar-brush, that nightmare feeling that you don’t know whether the hero is a plant or a man or a devil.  Don’t you feel it sometimes in ’Uncle Remus’?”

“True,” said Paynter.  “Perfectly true.”  And he looked at the lawyer with a new interest.  The lawyer, who had been introduced as Mr. Ashe, was one of those people who are more worth looking at than most people realize when they look.  If Napoleon had been red-haired, and had bent all his powers with a curious contentment upon the petty lawsuits of a province, he might have looked much the same; the head with the red hair was heavy and powerful; the figure in its dark, quiet clothes was comparatively insignificant, as was Napoleon’s.  He seemed more at ease in the Squire’s society than the doctor, who, though a gentleman, was a shy one, and a mere shadow of his professional brother.

“As you truly say,” remarked Paynter, “the story seems touched with quite barbarous elements, probably Negro.  Originally, though, I think there was really a hagiological story about some hermit, though some of the higher critics say St. Securis never existed, but was only an allegory of arboriculture, since his name is the Latin for an ax.”

“Oh, if you come to that,” remarked the poet Treherne, “you might as well say Squire Vane doesn’t exist, and that he’s only an allegory for a weathercock.”  Something a shade too cool about this sally drew the lawyer’s red brows together.  He looked across the table and met the poet’s somewhat equivocal smile.

“Do I understand, Mr. Treherne,” asked Ashe, “that you support the miraculous claims of St. Securis in this case.  Do you, by any chance, believe in the walking trees?”

“I see men as trees walking,” answered the poet, “like the man cured of blindness in the Gospel.  By the way, do I understand that you support the miraculous claims of that—­thaumaturgist?”

Paynter intervened swiftly and suavely.  “Now that sounds a fascinating piece of psychology.  You see men as trees?”

“As I can’t imagine why men should walk, I can’t imagine why trees shouldn’t,” answered Treherne.