is place,
his elbows on his knees, his chin propped in his hands. The minutes
passed--then the hours. The moon climbed steadily higher among the
stars. Vanamee rolled and smoked cigarette after cigarette, the blue
haze of smoke hanging motionless above his head, or drifting in slowly
weaving filaments across the open spaces of the garden.

But the influence of the old enclosure, this corner of romance and
mystery, this isolated garden of dreams, savouring of the past, with its
legends, its graves, its crumbling sun dial, its fountain with its rime
of moss, was not to be resisted. Now that the priest had left him, the
same exaltation of spirit that had seized upon Vanamee earlier in the
evening, by degrees grew big again in his mind and imagination. His
sorrow assaulted him like the flagellations of a fine whiplash, and his
love for Angele rose again in his heart, it seemed to him never so deep,
so tender, so infinitely strong. No doubt, it was his familiarity with
the Mission garden, his clear-cut remembrance of it, as it was in the
days when he had met Angele there, tallying now so exactly with the
reality there under his eyes, that brought her to his imagination so
vividly. As yet he dared not trust himself near her grave, but, for the
moment, he rose and, his hands clasped behind him, walked slowly from
point to point amid the tiny gravelled walks, recalling the incidents of
eighteen years ago. On the bench he had quitted he and Angele had often
sat. Here by the crumbling sun dial, he recalled the night when he had
kissed her for the first time. Here, again, by the rim of the fountain,
with its fringe of green, she once had paused, and, baring her arm to
the shoulder, had thrust it deep into the water, and then withdrawing
it, had given it to him to kiss, all wet and cool; and here, at last,
under the shadow of the pear trees they had sat, evening after evening,
looking off over the little valley below them, watching the night build
itself, dome-like, from horizon to zenith.

Brusquely Vanamee turned away from the prospect. The Seed ranch was dark
at this time of the year, and flowerless. Far off toward its centre, he
had caught a brief glimpse of the house where Angele had lived, and a
faint light burning in its window. But he turned from it sharply. The
deep-seated travail of his grief abruptly reached the paroxysm. With
long strides he crossed the garden and reentered the Mission church
itself, plunging into the