drawal. Then I
forgot her.... A touch of melancholy stole on me, as the garden took me
in its charge. For a garden is a ghostly place, and an old-world garden,
above all, leads thought backwards among vanished memories rather than
forward among constructive hopes and joys.

I yielded, in any case, a little to this subtle pressure from the past,
and I must have strolled among the lilac and laburnums for a longer time
than I knew, since the gardener who had been trimming the flower-beds
with a hand lawn-mower was gone, and dusk already veiled the cedars,
when I found myself leaning against the wooden gate that opened into the
less formal part beyond the larches.

The house was not visible from where I stood. I smelt the May, the
lilac, the heavy perfume everywhere of the opening year; it rose about
me in waves, as though full-bosomed summer lay breathing her great
promises close at hand, while spring, still lingering, with bright eyes
of dew,' watched over her. Then, suddenly, behind these richer scents, I
caught a sweeter, wilder tang than anything they contained, and turning,
saw that the pines were closer than I knew. A waft of something purer,
fresher, reached my nostrils on a little noiseless wind, as, leaning
across the gate, I turned my back upon the cultivated grounds and gazed
into a region of more natural, tangled growth.

The change was sudden. It was exquisite, sharp and unexpected, too, as
with a little touch of wonder. There was surprise in it. For the garden,
you will remember, melts here insensibly into a stretch of scattered
pines, where heather and bracken cover wide reaches of unreclaimed and
useless land. Irregular trails of whitish sand gleamed faintly before
the shadows swallowed them, and in the open patches I saw young
silver-birches that made me think of running children arrested in
mid-play. They stood outlined very tenderly against the sky; their
slender forms still quivered; their feathery hair fell earthwards as
they drew themselves together, bending their wayward little heads before
the approaching night. Behind them, framed by the darker pines into a
glowing frieze, the west still burned with the last fires of the sunset;
I could see the heather, rising and falling like a tumbled sea against
the horizon, where the dim heave of distant moorland broke the
afterglow.

And the dusk now held this region in its magic. So strange, indeed, was
the contrast between the ebony shadows and the pools