Suddenly Juliet came to a quick decision: she would find out what Julia Romaninov was doing.
She backed hurriedly into the bracken, and made her way slowly and cautiously around the clearing under the beech-tree to the edge of the hill again, keeping under cover of the fern and heather. When she peered over, Julia had disappeared from view beneath the rhododendrons.
For a minute Juliet's eyes searched the side of the slope below. Then she drew back her head quickly, for she had caught sight of another bush shaking uneasily a little way beyond the gap in which she had had her first glimpse of the cause of the disturbance. Cowering low in the bracken she crept along the top, keeping a foot or two from the edge, where the rock fell nearly perpendicularly for a few yards before its angle changed to the comparatively gradual, though actually steep slope of the hill which Julia was climbing.
From time to time she looked cautiously between clumps of fern or heath, to make sure that she was keeping level with her unconscious quarry.
The front of the hill swung round in a bold curve till it reached the castle; and it soon became evident that, if both girls continued to advance along the lines they were following, they would converge at a point where the end of the battlemented wall met the great holly hedge that formed two sides of the garden enclosure.
Juliet perceived this when she was not more than a dozen yards from the corner, and dropped at full length to the soft ground, at a spot where she could see between the stalks and under the leaves, and yet herself remain concealed. She had not long to wait. In a minute, Julia's face appeared over the brow of the hill. She pulled herself up by a young fir sapling that hung over the brink, and stood for a moment, flushed and panting after her long climb. She was dressed in a greenish tweed, which blended with the woodland surroundings, and her shoulder was turned to the place where Juliet lay wondering whether she would be discovered.
Fronting them, the end of the little turret, with which the wall of the old fortress now came to a sudden termination, could be seen rearing its grey stones above the dark glossy foliage of the hedge, which grew here with peculiar vigour and continued to the extreme edge of the cliff, and even farther.
What was Juliet's surprise to see Julia, when she had found her breath, and taken one quick look round as if to satisfy herself she was unobserved, suddenly cast herself down, in her turn, upon the damp earth, and inserting her head beneath the prickly barricade of the holly leaves, begin to crawl and wriggle forward until she had completely disappeared under it. What in the world could she be doing?