There he paused at the
bookstall to add to his light luggage a number of cheap murder
stories, which he read with great pleasure, and without any
premonition that he was about to walk into as strange a story in
real life.
A little before sunset he arrived, with his light suitcase in hand,
before the gate of the long riverside gardens of Willowood Place,
one of the smaller seats of Sir Isaac Hook, the master of much
shipping and many newspapers. He entered by the gate giving on the
road, at the opposite side to the river, but there was a mixed
quality in all that watery landscape which perpetually reminded a
traveler that the river was near. White gleams of water would shine
suddenly like swords or spears in the green thickets. And even in
the garden itself, divided into courts and curtained with hedges and
high garden trees, there hung everywhere in the air the music of
water. The first of the green courts which he entered appeared to be
a somewhat neglected croquet lawn, in which was a solitary young man
playing croquet against himself. Yet he was not an enthusiast for
the game, or even for the garden; and his sallow but well-featured
face looked rather sullen than otherwise. He was only one of those
young men who cannot support the burden of consciousness unless they
are doing something, and whose conceptions of doing something are
limited to a game of some kind.
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