J’aime, I love. 
  Tu aimes, Thou lovest. 
  Il aime, He loves.

It runs in my head like some silly refrain.  I meet Bobby.  I also meet Vick, my little shivering, smooth, white terrier.  They both join me.  The one wriggles herself into the shape of a trembling comma, and, foolishly chasing herself, rolls over on her back, to demonstrate her joy at my advent.  The other says: 

“Come into the kitchen-garden, and see whether the apricot-flowers are out on the south wall.”

We pace along the broad and even gravel walk among the red cabbages and the sea-kale, basking in the sun, whose heat we feel undiminished by the influence of any bitter blast, in the prison of these four high walls, against which the long tree-branches are pinioned.  In one place, the pinioning has failed.  Along, flower-laden arm has burst from its bonds, and is dangling loosely down.  There is a ladder against the wall, set for the gardener to replace it.

“Is it difficult to get up a ladder, Bobby?” ask I, standing still.

“Difficult!  Bless your heart, no!  Why?”

“One can see nothing here,” I answer.  “I should like to climb up and sit on the top of the wall, where one can look about one.”

My wish is easy of gratification.  Bobby holds the ladder, and I climb cautiously, rung by rung.  Having reached the summit, I sit at ease, with, my legs loosely dangling.  There is no broken glass, there are no painful bottoms of bottles to disturb my ruminant quiet.  The air bites a little, but I am warmly clad, and young.  Bobby sits beside me, whistling and kicking the bricks with his heels.  There is the indistinctness of fine weather over the chain of low round hills that bound our horizon, giving them a dignity that, on clearer days, they lack.  As I sit, many small and pleasant noises visit my ears, sometimes distinct, sometimes mixed together; the brook’s noise, as it runs, quick and brown, between the flat, dry March fields; the gray geese’s noise, as they screech all together from the farm-yard; the church-bells’ noise, as they ring out from the distant town, whose roofs and vanes are shining and glinting in the morning sun.

“Do you hear the bells?” say I.  “Some one has been married this morning.”

“Do not you wish it was you?” asks Bobby, with a brotherly grin.

“I should not mind,” reply I, picking out a morsel of mortar with my finger and thumb.  “It is about time for one of us to move off, is not it?  And Barbara has made such a signal failure hitherto, that I think it is but fair that I should try my little possible.”

“All I ask of you is,” says Bobby, gravely, “not to take a fellow who has not got any shooting.”

“I will make it a sine qua non,” I answer, seriously.

A louder screech than ever from the geese, accompanied with wing-flappings.  How unanimous they are!  There is not a voice wanting.

“I wonder how long Sir Roger will stay?” I say presently.