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Don't shoot till you have to; but when you do !" "I know!" breathed she. Then, all at once, there they were at the gate, at the big tree, standing out there in the open, on the thick carpet of pine-spills. And before them lay the mossy, shaded forest aisles with what a horror camped all through that peaceful, wondrous place! "Oh!" gasped Beatrice. The engineer stopped as though frozen.
Warm lay the sun there. A pleasant carpet of last year's leaves and pine-spills covered the earth. "It's all ready and waiting for us, all embowered and carpeted for love," said Allan musingly. "I wonder what old Van Amburg would think of his estate if he could see it now? And what would he say to our having it?
Moss, lichens and weeds grew on the steps, flourishing in the detritus that had accumulated. Allan dug the toe of his sandal into the loose drift of dead leaves and pine-spills that littered the broad piazza. "It'll need more than a vacuum cleaner to put this in shape!" said he. "Well, the sooner we get at it, the better. We'd do well to take a look at the inside."
Through the wind-swayed branches, little flickering patches of morning sunlight met his gaze, as they played and quivered on the forest moss or over the sere pine-spills. Even upon the huge, squared stones which here and there lay in disorder, and which Stern knew must have fallen from the tower, the moss grew very thick; and more than one such block had been rent by frost and growing things.
The marble floor was covered now with windrows of dead leaves and pine-spills, and with the litter from myriads of birds'-nests that sheltered themselves on achitraves and galleries, and on the lofty capitals of the fluted pillars which rose, vistalike, a hundred feet above the clear-story, spraying out into a wondrous complexity of ribs to sustain the marvelous concrete vaultings full two hundred feet in air.
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