But he also picked up a sword as he stepped to open it.

He paused one moment with his hand on the handle and then flung the door open.  Almost as he did so the ferrule of an ordinary bamboo cane came at his eyes, so that he had actually to parry it with the naked weapon in his hands.  As the two touched, the point of the stick was dropped very abruptly, and the man with the stick stepped hurriedly back.

Against the heraldic background of sprawling crimson and gold offered him by the expiring sunset, the figure of the man with the stick showed at first merely black and fantastic.  He was a small man with two wisps of long hair that curled up on each side, and seen in silhouette, looked like horns.  He had a bow tie so big that the two ends showed on each side of his neck like unnatural stunted wings.  He had his long black cane still tilted in his hand like a fencing foil and half presented at the open door.  His large straw hat had fallen behind him as he leapt backwards.

“With reference to your suggestion, MacIan,” said Turnbull, placidly, “I think it looks more like the Devil.”

“Who on earth are you?” cried the stranger in a high shrill voice, brandishing his cane defensively.

“Let me see,” said Turnbull, looking round to MacIan with the same blandness.  “Who are we?”

“Come out,” screamed the little man with the stick.

“Certainly,” said Turnbull, and went outside with the sword, MacIan following.

Seen more fully, with the evening light on his face, the strange man looked a little less like a goblin.  He wore a square pale-grey jacket suit, on which the grey butterfly tie was the only indisputable touch of affectation.  Against the great sunset his figure had looked merely small:  seen in a more equal light it looked tolerably compact and shapely.  His reddish-brown hair, combed into two great curls, looked like the long, slow curling hair of the women in some pre-Raphaelite pictures.  But within this feminine frame of hair his face was unexpectedly impudent, like a monkey’s.

“What are you doing here?” he said, in a sharp small voice.

“Well,” said MacIan, in his grave childish way, “what are you doing here?”

“I,” said the man, indignantly, “I’m in my own garden.”

“Oh,” said MacIan, simply, “I apologize.”

Turnbull was coolly curling his red moustache, and the stranger stared from one to the other, temporarily stunned by their innocent assurance.

“But, may I ask,” he said at last, “what the devil you are doing in my summer-house?”

“Certainly,” said MacIan.  “We were just going to fight.”

“To fight!” repeated the man.

“We had better tell this gentleman the whole business,” broke in Turnbull.  Then turning to the stranger he said firmly, “I am sorry, sir, but we have something to do that must be done.  And I may as well tell you at the beginning and to avoid waste of time or language, that we cannot admit any interference.”