believe I am the first son of Adam who ever manufactured all the evidence of a murder charge against himself.”
It was the Squire’s turn to look astonished. The old gentleman looked rather wildly from one to the other.
“Bones! Murder charge!” he ejaculated. “What the devil is all this? Whose bones?”
“Your bones, in a manner of speaking,” delicately conceded the doctor. “I had to make sure you had really died, and not disappeared by magic.”
The Squire in his turn seemed more hopelessly puzzled than the whole crowd of his friends had been over his own escapade. “Why not?” he demanded. “I thought it was the whole point to make it look like magic. Why did you want me to die so much?”
Doctor Brown had lifted his head; and he now very slowly lifted his hand. He pointed with outstretched arm at the headland overhanging the foreshore, just above the entrance to the cave. It was the exact part of the beach where Paynter had first landed, on that spring morning when he had looked up in his first fresh wonder at the peacock trees. But the trees were gone.
The fact itself was no surprise to them; the clearance had naturally been one of the first of the sweeping changes of the Treherne regime. But though they knew it well, they had wholly forgotten it; and its significance returned on them suddenly like a sign in heaven.
“That is the reason,” said the doctor. “I have worked for that for fourteen years.”
They no longer looked at the bare promontory on which the feathery trees had once been so familiar a sight; for they had something else to look at. Anyone seeing the Squire now would have shifted his opinion about where to find the lunatic in that crowd. It was plain in a flash that the change had fallen on him like a thunderbolt; that he, at least, had never had the wildest notion that the tale of the Vanishing Squire had been but a prelude to that of the vanishing trees. The next half hour was full of his ravings and expostulations, which gradually died away into demands for explanation and incoherent questions repeated again and again. He had practically to be overruled at last, in spite of the respect in which he was held, before
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