self, half
remembering some line from a play or poem where the heroine bore down
thus with feathers flying and airs saluting her. The greenery and the
high presences of the trees surrounded her as if they stood forth at her
coming. He rose, and she saw him; her little exclamation proved that she
was glad to find him, and then that she blamed herself for being late.

"Why did you never tell me? I didn't know there was this," she remarked,
alluding to the lake, the broad green space, the vista of trees, with
the ruffled gold of the Thames in the distance and the Ducal castle
standing in its meadows. She paid the rigid tail of the Ducal lion the
tribute of incredulous laughter.

"You've never been to Kew?" Denham remarked.

But it appeared that she had come once as a small child, when the
geography of the place was entirely different, and the fauna included
certainly flamingoes and, possibly, camels. They strolled on,
refashioning these legendary gardens. She was, as he felt, glad merely
to stroll and loiter and let her fancy touch upon anything her eyes
encountered--a bush, a park-keeper, a decorated goose--as if the
relaxation soothed her. The warmth of the afternoon, the first of
spring, tempted them to sit upon a seat in a glade of beech-trees, with
forest drives striking green paths this way and that around them. She
sighed deeply.

"It's so peaceful," she said, as if in explanation of her sigh. Not a
single person was in sight, and the stir of the wind in the branches,
that sound so seldom heard by Londoners, seemed to her as if wafted from
fathomless oceans of sweet air in the distance.

While she breathed and looked, Denham was engaged in uncovering with the
point of his stick a group of green spikes half smothered by the dead
leaves. He did this with the peculiar touch of the botanist. In naming
the little green plant to her he used the Latin name, thus disguising
some flower familiar even to Chelsea, and making her exclaim, half in
amusement, at his knowledge. Her own ignorance was vast, she confessed.
What did one call that tree opposite, for instance, supposing one
condescended to call it by its English name? Beech or elm or sycamore?
It chanced, by the testimony of a dead leaf, to be oak; and a little
attention to a diagram which Denham proceeded to draw upon an envelope
soon put Katharine in possession of some of the fundamental distinctions
between our British trees. She then asked him to inform her abo