that summer and
the last.

The garden behind the two cottages was all Langholm's. The whole thing,
levelled, would not have made a single lawn-tennis court, nor yet a
practice pitch of proper length. Yet this little garden contained almost
everything that a garden need have. There were tall pines among the
timber to one side, and through these set the sun, so that on the
hottest days the garden was in sufficient shadow by the time the
morning's work was done. There was a little grass-plot, large enough for
a basket-chair and a rug. There was a hedge of Penzance sweet-brier
opposite the backdoor and the window at which Langholm wrote, and yet
this hedge broke down in the very nick and place to give the lucky
writer a long glimpse across a green valley, with dim woods upon the
opposite hill. And then there were the roses, planted by the last
cottager--a retired gardener--a greater artist than his successor--a man
who knew what roses were!

Over the house clambered a William Allen Richardson and two Gloires de
Dijon, these last a-blowing, the first still resting from a profuse
yield in June; in the southeast corner, a Crimson Rambler was at its
ripe red height; and Caroline Testout, Margaret Dickson, La France,
Madame Lambard, and Madame Cochet, blushed from pale pink to richest
red, or remained coldly but beautifully white, at the foot of the
Penzance briers. Langholm had not known one rose from another when he
came to live among this galaxy; now they were his separate, familiar,
individual friends, each with its own character in his eyes, its own
charm for him; and the man's soul was the sweeter for each summer spent
in their midst. But to-night they called to closed nostrils and blind
eyes. And the evening sun, reddening the upper stems of the pines, and
warming the mellow tiles of his dear cottage, had no more to say to
Langholm's spirit than his beloved roses.

The man had emerged from the dreamy, artistic, aesthetic existence into
which he had drifted through living alone amid so much simple beauty; he
was in real, human, haunting trouble, and the manlier man for it
already.

Could he be mistaken after all? No; the more he pondered, the more
convinced he felt. Everything pointed to the same conclusion, beginning
with that first dinner-party at Upthorpe, and that first conversation of
which he remembered every word. Mrs. Steel was Mrs. Minchin--the
notorious Mrs. Minchin--the Mrs. Minchin who had been tried for h