Excerpt from An Affair of Dishonour DishonorFive o'clock by the sundial on the lawn, and the man that had to fight the duel at seven was sound asleep and dreaming. He was dreaming about a place that must have been in existence, of course, when he was a boy, or how could it be there now? And there it was, sure enough, with the great marble fountain in the centre, and the yew-hedges clipped into the form of dancers all round. And there in the fountain-basin were the huge fish that must have been there then, human heads and all. And the six globes of solid gold on each angle of the hexagon parapet that skirted it and held the water in. None of these things had ever been brought to the Hall in his time - he was sure of it.Then of a sudden it dawned upon him that this strange place was only Pan's Garden, familiar to his boyhood. But there was no such fountain in those days. That was all new. Nothing was there then but a shallow stone basin where the paths crossed, with a foursquare parapet just above the ground, a mere lip-rim of acanthus-leaf, with a bare relic of the God in the centre, washed for ever by the water-trickle that still kept a memory of the purpose of its youth. But how came he never to have noticed this new fountain? That was the oddity of it. He did not trouble about the human heads on the fish.It was not as if the Box Walk, so called, that led to it was one that he had shunned in those days.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.