e path of dalliance. As for
me, my dear sir, by the time this reaches you, I shall be on the long
trail. You needn't blow any trumpets about it, for B. G. will have no
funeral. The name that I gave you as the name that I live here under is
good enough to die here under. The certain fact for your consideration
is that I die at once, and that the question of this property entail is
now confided to you to arrange for my heir, young Steering. Write to the
clerk of Snow Mountain County for the documents that I have left with
him for you. They establish everything. Tell my cousin that, besides the
Tigmores, I bequeath him my debts to you. This leaves me not at all
envious of the job ahead of him, and, as ever,

"Your blindly devoted servant,

"BRUCE GRIERSON."

_Chapter Seven_

THE GARDEN OF DREAMS

Crittenton Madeira's daughter wandered down the garden path, singing
softly, after her father had left her, but there was in her song, as
there had been in her laughter, a little tremble of unrest. The garden
was a delicious place, whose fragrance beat up in waves of sweetness at
every turn. All the flowers were in their luxuriant last bloom. There
were great roses and sweet elysium, mignonette, peppermint pinks, crepe
myrtle, riotous vines and creepers. Long ago she had taken everything
out of the garden that was not sweet. She had a fancy that fragrance was
one of the spirit's tremulous paths into heaven, and out in the garden
she liked to shut her eyes and, with her little straight nose in the
air, go drifting off toward what was infinitely good, fine, strong,
imperishable. It sometimes seemed to her that the most intimate and
exquisite happinesses of her life had come to her with her eyes shut in
that garden. She called it the Garden of Dreams.

When Steering found her, she was waiting for him, her arms on an old
vine-covered stump, that dusky-gold radiance of hers playing over her
and from her, the most beautifully, glowingly alive woman in the world.
What he said to her was "How-do-you-do?" But what he wanted to say was,
"Oh, stand there so forever, and let every grace, every beauty burn into
my brain, so that all my life I may carry you about with me, your
wine-warm eyes, your sunlit hair, the whole sweet glow of you,--having
you perfectly, knowing you perfectly everywhere, everyhow, near, far, in
the sunshine, in the dark!" And when a man wants to tal