but just to fill them in."

"Fill them in!" cried the other young man, getting quite excited. "You don't know what a hole this is; it would take a ton of earth to fill it in."

"You're not serious, Mr. Delavoye."

"Well, it would take a couple of barrow-loads. It's a regular depression in the ground, and the funny thing is that it's come almost while my back was turned. I finished marking...And I was left clinging with both eyes to my companion's cool attire.
"But that's my very point," he laughed and said. "These City fellows are the absolute salt of historic earth like this; they throw one back into the good old days by sheer force of contrast. I never see them in their office kit without thinking of that old rascal in his wig and ruffles, carrying a rapier instead of an umbrella; he'd have fallen on it like Brutus if he could have seen his grounds plastered with cheap red bricks and mortar, and crawling with Stock Exchange ants!"
"You've got an imagination," said I, chuckling. I nearly told him he had the gift of the gab as well.
"You must have something," he returned a little grimly, "when you're stuck on the shelf at my age. Besides, it isn't all imagination, and you needn't go back a hundred years for your romance. There's any amount kicking about this Estate at the present moment; it's in the soil. These business blokes are not all the dull dogs they look. There's a man up our road--but he can wait. The first mystery to solve is the one that's crying from our back garden."
I liked his way of putting things. It made one forget his yellow face, and the broken career that his looks and hints suggested, or it made one remember them and think the more of him. But the things themselves were interesting, and Witching Hill had more possibilities when we sallied forth together at one o'clock.
It was the height of such a June as the old century could produce up to the last. The bald red houses, too young to show a shoot of creeper, or a mellow tone from doorstep to chimney-pot, glowed like clowns' pokers in the ruthless sun. The shade of some stately elms, on a bit of old road between the two new ones of the Estate, appealed sharply to my awakened sense of contrast. It was all familiar ground to me, of course, but I had been over it hitherto with my eyes on nothing else and my heart in the Lowlands. Now I found myself wondering what the elms had seen in their day, and what might not be going on in the red houses even now.
"I hope you know the proper name of our road," said Delavoye as we turned into it. "It's Mulcaster Park, as you see, and not Mulcaster Park Road, as it was when we came here in the spring. Our 

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