ly garden this is!" remarked Donal after the sequent pause.
"I have never seen anything like it."

"It is very old-fashioned," she returned. "Do you not find it very
stiff and formal?"

"Stately and precise, I should rather say."

"I do not mean I can help liking it--in a way."

"Who could help liking it that took his feeling from the garden itself,
not from what people said about it!"

"You cannot say it is like nature!"

"Yes; it is very like human nature. Man ought to learn of nature, but
not to imitate nature. His work is, through the forms that Nature
gives him, to express the idea or feeling that is in him. That is far
more likely to produce things in harmony with nature, than the attempt
to imitate nature upon the small human scale."

"You are too much of a philosopher for me!" said Miss Graeme. "I
daresay you are quite right, but I have never read anything about art,
and cannot follow you."

"You have probably read as much as I have. I am only talking out of
what necessity, the necessity for understanding things, has made me
think. One must get things brought together in one's thoughts, if only
to be able to go on thinking."

This too was beyond Miss Graeme. The silence again fell, and Donal let
it lie, waiting for her to break it this time.

CHAPTER XXII.

A TALK ABOUT GHOSTS.

But again he was the first.

They had turned and gone a good way down the long garden, and had again
turned towards the house.

"This place makes me feel as I never felt before," he said. "There is
such a wonderful sense of vanished life about it. The whole garden
seems dreaming about things of long ago--when troops of ladies, now
banished into pictures, wandered about the place, each full of her own
thoughts and fancies of life, each looking at everything with ways of
thinking as old-fashioned as her garments. I could not be here after
nightfall without feeling as if every walk were answering to unseen
feet, as if every tree might be hiding some lovely form, returned to
dream over old memories."

"Where is the good of fancying what is not true? I can't care for what
I know to be nonsense!"

She was glad to find a spot where she could put down the foot of
contradiction, for she came of a family known for what the neighbours
called common sense, and in the habit of casting contempt upon
everything characterized as superstition: she had now something to say
for herself!

"How do you know it is nonsense?