They had alighted in the middle of a very broad garden path, and the clearing mist permitted them to see the edge of a well-clipped lawn.  Though the white vapour was still a veil, it was like the gauzy veil of a transformation scene in a pantomime; for through it there glowed shapeless masses of colour, masses which might be clouds of sunrise or mosaics of gold and crimson, or ladies robed in ruby and emerald draperies.  As it thinned yet farther they saw that it was only flowers; but flowers in such insolent mass and magnificence as can seldom be seen out of the tropics.  Purple and crimson rhododendrons rose arrogantly, like rampant heraldic animals against their burning background of laburnum gold.  The roses were red hot; the clematis was, so to speak, blue hot.  And yet the mere whiteness of the syringa seemed the most violent colour of all.  As the golden sunlight gradually conquered the mists, it had really something of the sensational sweetness of the slow opening of the gates of Eden.  MacIan, whose mind was always haunted with such seraphic or titanic parallels, made some such remark to his companion.  But Turnbull only cursed and said that it was the back garden of some damnable rich man.

When the last haze had faded from the ordered paths, the open lawns, and the flaming flower-beds, the two realized, not without an abrupt re-examination of their position, that they were not alone in the garden.

Down the centre of the central garden path, preceded by a blue cloud from a cigarette, was walking a gentleman who evidently understood all the relish of a garden in the very early morning.  He was a slim yet satisfied figure, clad in a suit of pale-grey tweed, so subdued that the pattern was imperceptible—­a costume that was casual but not by any means careless.  His face, which was reflective and somewhat over-refined, was the face of a quite elderly man, though his stringy hair and moustache were still quite yellow.  A double eye-glass, with a broad, black ribbon, drooped from his aquiline nose, and he smiled, as he communed with himself, with a self-content which was rare and almost irritating.  The straw panama on his head was many shades shabbier than his clothes, as if he had caught it up by accident.

It needed the full shock of the huge shadow of MacIan, falling across his sunlit path, to rouse him from his smiling reverie.  When this had fallen on him he lifted his head a little and blinked at the intruders with short-sighted benevolence, but with far less surprise than might have been expected.  He was a gentleman; that is, he had social presence of mind, whether for kindness or for insolence.

“Can I do anything for you?” he said, at last.

MacIan bowed.  “You can extend to us your pardon,” he said, for he also came of a whole race of gentlemen—­of gentlemen without shirts to their backs.  “I am afraid we are trespassing.  We have just come over the wall.”