ou couldn't beat that out of them if you tried. Very few of
them understand how simple success is; it isn't easy often, but it is
always simple."

Peter supposed that he really ought to go after that, though he did not
know how to manage it until Mrs. Dassonville smiled at him over her
husband's shoulder and asked him what sort of work he did. "Oh, if you
know about gardens," she interrupted him, "you can help a little. There
are such a lot of things coming up in mine that I don't know the names
of."

It flashed out to Peter long afterward that she had simply provided an
easy way for him to get out of the house now that his visit was
terminated. She held the white fold of her shawl over her head with one
hand and gathered the trailing skirts with the other. They rustled as
she moved like the leaves of the elms at night above the roof, as she
led him along the walk where little straight spears of green and blunt
flower crowns faintly tinged with colour came up thickly in the borders.
So by degrees she got him down past the hyacinth beds and the nodding
buds of the daffodils to the gate and on the road again, walking home in
the chill early twilight with the pricking of a pleasant excitement in
his veins.

It was that, perhaps, and the sense of having got so much more out of it
than any account of his visit would justify, that kept Peter from saying
much to his mother that night about his talk with the rich man; he asked
her instead if she had ever seen Mrs. Dassonville.

"Yes," she assured him. "Mr. Dassonville drove her over to Mrs.
Tillinghurst's funeral in October. They had only been married a little
while then; she is the second Mrs. Dassonville, you know; the first died
years ago. I thought her a very lovely lady."

"A lovely lady," Peter said the phrase under his breath. The sound of it
was like the soft drawing of silken skirts.

His mother looked at him across the supper table and was pleased to see
the renewal of cheerfulness, and then, motherlike, sighed to think that
Peter was getting so old now that if he didn't choose to tell her things
she had no right to ask him. "Your walk has done you good," was all she
said, and it must have been the case, for that very night as soon as his
head had touched the pillow he was off again, as he hadn't been since
Ellen fell ill, to the House of the Shining Walls. It rose stately
against a blur of leafless woods and crocus-coloured sky. The garden
before it was all fu