“There’s a grand tree over toward the road,” he said. his attention wandering.  “It must be nearly a century old.  It has the most magnificent sweep of foliage I’ve seen since I left the North.  What is it?”

“That?” she queried.  “Oh, that’s another of Milo’s prides.  It’s an Egyptian fig.  ’Ficus Something or other.’  Isn’t it beautiful?  But it isn’t a century old.  It isn’t more than fifteen years old.  It grows tremendously fast.  Milo has been trying to interest the authorities in Miami in planting lines of them for shade trees and having them in the city parks.  There’s nothing more beautiful.  And nothing, except the Australian pine, grows faster ....  There’s another of Milo’s delights,” she continued, pointing to the left.  “It’s ever so old.  The natives around here call it ’The Ghost Tree.’”

They had been moving in a wide circle through the groves.  Now, approaching the house from the other side, they came out on a grassy little space on the far edge of the lawn.  In the center of the space stood a giant live-oak towering as high as a royal palm, and with mighty boughs stretching out in vast symmetry on every side.  It was a true forest monarch.  And like many another monarch. it was only a ghost of its earlier grandeur.

For from every outflung limb and from every tiniest twig hung plumes and festoons and stalactites of gray moss.  For perhaps a hundred years the moss had been growing thus on the giant oak, first in little bunches and trailers that were scarce noticeable and which affected the forest monarch’s appearance and health not at all.

Then year by year the moss had grown and had taken toll of the bark and sap.  At last it had killed the tree on which it fed.  And its own source of life being withdrawn itself had died.

So, now the gaunt tree with its symmetrical spread of branches stood lifeless.  And its tons of low-hanging festooned moss was as void of life as was the tree they had killed.  Tinder-dry it hung there, a beauteous, tragic, spectacle, towering high above the surrounding flatness of landscape, visible for miles by land and by sea.

Fifty yards beyond a high interlaced hedge of vines bordered the clearing.  Toward this Gavin bent his idle steps, wondering vaguely how such a lofty and impenetrable wall of vine was supported from the far side.

Claire had stopped to call off Bobby Burns who had discovered a highly dramatic toad-hole on the edge of the lawn and who was digging enthusiastically at it with both flying fore-feet, casting up a cloud of dirt and cutting into the sward’s neat border.  Thus she was not aware of Brice’s diversion.

Gavin approached the twenty-foot high vine-wall, and thrust his hand in through the thick tangle of leaves.  His sensitive fingers touched the surface of a paling.  Running his hand along. he found that the entire vine palisade was, apparently, backed by a twenty-foot stockade of solid boards.  If there were a gate, it was hidden from view.  It was then that Claire, looking up from luring Bobby Burns away from the toad-hole, saw whither Gavin had strayed.