ow wings. "He got the
idea from the orangery of a Georgian house in England, and an English
architect designed it."
Honora took up the other photographs. One of them, over which she
lingered, was of a charming, old-fashioned garden spattered with
sunlight, and shut out from the world by a high brick wall. Behind the
wall, again, were the dense masses of the trees, and at the end of a path
between nodding foxgloves and Canterbury bells, in a curved recess, a
stone seat.
She turned her face. His was at her shoulder.
"How could you ever have left it?" she asked reproachfully.
She voiced his own regrets, which the crowding memories had awakened.
"I don't know," he answered, not without emotion. "I have often asked
myself that question." He crossed over to the railing of the porch, swung
about, and looked at her. Her eyes were still on the picture. "I can
imagine you in that garden," he said.
Did the garden cast the spell by which she saw herself on the seat? or
was it Chiltern's voice? She would indeed love and cherish it. And was it
true that she belonged there, securely infolded within those peaceful
walls? How marvellously well was Thalia playing her comedy! Which was the
real, and which the false? What of true value, what of peace and security
was contained in her present existence? She had missed the meaning of
things, and suddenly it was held up before her, in a garden.
A later hour found them in Honora's runabout wandering northward along
quiet country roads on the eastern side of the island. Chiltern, who was
driving, seemed to take no thought of their direction, until at last,
with an exclamation, he stopped the horse; and Honora beheld an abandoned
mansion of a bygone age sheltered by ancient trees, with wide lands
beside it sloping to the water.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Beaulieu," he replied. "It was built in the seventeenth century, I
believe, and must have been a fascinating place in colonial days." He
drove in between the fences and tied the horse, and came around by the
side of the runabout. "Won't you get out and look at it?"
She hesitated, and their eyes met as he held out his hand, but she
avoided it and leaped quickly to the ground neither spoke as they walked
around the deserted house and gazed at the quaint facade, broken by a
crumbling, shaded balcony let in above the entrance door. No sound broke
the stillness of the summer's day--a pregnant stillness. The air was
heavy with per
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