Much of the terrace had crumbled, and the main section of the mob cut straight across the lawn, by-passing the gutted villa, but one or two of the more curious climbed up and searched among the shell.  The doors had rotted from their hinges and the floors had fallen through.  In the music room an ancient harpsichord had been chopped into firewood, but a few keys still lay among the dust.  All the books had been toppled from the shelves in the library, the canvases had been slashed, and gilt frames littered the floor.

As the main body of the mob reached the house, it began to cross the wall at all points along its length.  Jostled together, the people stumbled into the dry lake, swarmed over the terrace and pressed through the house towards the open doors on the north side.

One area alone withstood the endless wave.  Just below the terrace, between the wrecked balcony and the wall was a dense, two-metre high growth of heavy thorn bushes.  The barbed foliage formed an impenetrable mass, and the people passing stepped around it carefully, noticing the belladonna entwined among the branches.  Most of them were too busy finding their footing among the upturned flagstones to look up into the centre of the thorn-bushes, where two stone statues stood side by side, gazing out over the grounds from their protected vantage point.  The larger of the figures was the effigy of a bearded man in a high-collared jacket, a cane under one arm.  Beside him was a woman in an elaborate full-skirted dress, her slim serene face unmarked by the wind and rain.  In her left hand she lightly clasped a single rose, the delicately formed petals so thin as to be almost transparent.

As the sun died away behind the house a single ray of light glanced through a shattered cornice and struck the rose, reflected off the whorl of petals on to the statues, lighting up the grey stone so that for a fleeting moment it was indistinguishable from the long-vanished flesh of the statues’ originals.