t home the greatest treasure
of all, that adventurer. He has brought home the beaten gold of his
love, and the hammered silver of his dreams--and he has brought them
from very far."

"He had brought greater treasures than those to you, lucky room," said
the last of the adventurers. "You can never be sad again--you will
always be gay and proud--because for just one moment he brought you the
gold of her hair and the silver of her voice."

"He is talking great nonsense, room," said a very small voice, "but it
is beautiful nonsense, and I am a wicked girl, and I hope that he will
talk some more. And please, I think we will go into the garden and see."

All the way back down the flagged path to the herb-garden they were
quiet--even after he had arranged the cushions against the rose-red
wall, even after he had stretched out at full length beside her and
lighted another pipe.

After a while he said, staring at the straw hive: "There used to be a
jolly little fat brown one that was a great pal of mine. How long do
bees live?"

"I don't know," she answered vaguely, and after a long pause, full of
quiet, pleasant odors from the bee-garden, and the sleepy happy noises
of small things tucking themselves away for the night, and the faint but
poignant drift of tobacco smoke, she asked: "What was it about 'honey
still for tea'?"

"Oh, that!" He raised himself on one elbow so that he could see her
better. "It was a poem I came across while I was in East Africa; some
one sent a copy of Rupert Brooke's things to a chap out there, and this
one fastened itself around me like a vise. It starts where he's sitting
in a cafe in Berlin with a lot of German Jews around him, swallowing
down their beer; and suddenly he remembers. All the lost, unforgettable
beauty comes back to him in that dirty place; it gets him by the throat.
It got me, too.

"'Ah, God! to see the branches stir
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River-smell, and hear the breeze
Sobbing in the little trees.
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain?--oh, yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey s