t must have been an
idyllic childhood, the thrill that, as a child, he used to feel when he
read, "_The Queen was in her parlor eating bread and honey._" This was
such another parlor infinitely secluded from the world; and he thought
he had never experienced a more breathless minute of anticipation than
when he followed the girls along the corridor to their nursery. The
matting worn silky with age seemed so eternally unprofaned, and on the
wall outside the door the cuckoo calling five o'clock was like a
confident bird in some paradise where neither time nor humanity was of
much importance. Janet, the elderly parlor-maid, came stumping in behind
them with the nursery tea-things; and, as Guy sat by the small hob-grate
and saw the moist autumnal sun etherealize with wan gold the tattered
volumes of childhood, the very plum cake on the tea-table was endowed
with the romantic perfection of a cake in a picture-book. When the sun
dipped behind the elms Guy half expected that Margaret and Pauline would
vanish too, so exactly seemed they the figures that, were this room a
mirage, he would expect to find within as guardians of the rare
seclusion. Guy never could say what was talked about that afternoon; for
when he found himself outside once again in the air of earth, he was
bemused with the whole experience, as if suddenly released from
enchantment. Out of a multitude of impressions, which had seemed at the
time most delicately strange and potent, only a few incidents quite
commonplace haunted his memory tangibly enough to be seized and
cherished. Tea-cups floating on laughter against that wall-paper of
berries, birds, and daisies; a pair of sugar-tongs clicking to the
pressure of long, white fingers (so much could he recapture of
Margaret); crumpets in a rosy mist (so much was Pauline); a copper
kettle singing; the lisp of the wind; a disarray of tambour-frames and
music, these were all that kept him company on his way back to Plashers
Mead through the colorless twilight.

Chance favored Guy next day by throwing him into the arms of the Rector,
who asked if he were fond enough of flowers to look round the garden at
a dull season of the year. Guy was so much elated that, if love of
flowers meant more frequent opportunities of going to the Rectory, he
would have given up poetry to become a professional gardener. Of course
there was nothing to see, according to the Rector--a few nerines of
his own crossing in the greenhouse; a _Bu