The hard lustre of the stones acquired a painful association with the ordeal.
On one occasion she had washed his small hands between hers. In the mood that was growing upon him, it would not have much surprised him to find her sitting bolt upright in her carved high-backed chair, as she had sat in the time of his earliest recollections, - the thin, yellow hands, on which the rings stood out, folded in her lap. It had taken all the sunshine in the garden to make him warm again. It had overwhelmed him with a sudden chill, that so she would have received tidings of his own. He remembered the unmoved manner in which she had received the news of the death of a near relative. Every one from the parson to the servants had stood a little in awe of her. It was difficult to bring to mind that it was no longer an existent force. She must have possessed a strong personality. Besides, he took after the wrong branch of the family. Her affections had all been buried before he was born. He guessed later that she had grudged him any of the endearments that death had denied her bestowing upon her own children. It was here the man had been brought up by an old great-aunt. The house faced southward upon the garden. The timber, at all events, would add to the value.
One of the latter’s clients had already made a bid for the estate. He had arranged to meet the lawyer there that afternoon. The property would scarcely realize as high a price in the market as he had hoped and it was incumbent upon him to part with it, if he would be released from the narrow circumstances that hemmed him in. He was conscious of a sense of disappointment. There had been a time when it had appeared as a domain of extensive proportions, and the wood beyond of marvelous depth and density. Yes, the garden was certainly smaller than it had been pictured by his memory. The gate hung on rusty hinges it answered with a long drawn-out creaking, as it was pushed open by a man who had been a stranger to the place for nearly twenty years. They could never have had that aspect if they had been only wild flowers and never experienced human care and companionship. The flowers had the air of being overburdened with the monotony of their existence. The wind played among the branches, and cast changing sun-flecked shadows on the grass-grown paths, narrowed by the encroachment of the box borders that had once lined the way with the stiff precision of troops before a royal progress. The lilac and lavender bushes were past their prime their wealth of sweetness had been squandered by riotous offshoots. THE garden looked dreary and desolate in spite of the afternoon sunshine.
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