Its roses were not the only merit of this ideal retreat, though in the summer months they made it difficult for one with eyes and nostrils to appreciate the others.  There was a delightful room running right through the cottage; and it was here that Langholm worked, ate, smoked, read, and had his daily being; his bath was in the room adjoining, and his bed in another adjoining that.  Of the upper floor he made no use; it was filled with the neglected furniture of a more substantial establishment, and Langholm seldom so much as set foot upon the stairs.  The lower rooms were very simply furnished.  There was a really old oak bureau, and some solid, comfortable chairs.  The pictures were chiefly photographs of other writers.  There were better pictures deep in dust upstairs.

An artist in temperament, if not in attainment, Langholm had of late years found the ups and downs of his own work supply all the excitement that was necessary to his life; it was only when the work was done that his solitude had oppressed him; but neither the one nor the other had been the case of late weeks.  His new book had been written under the spur of an external stimulus; it had not written itself, like all the more reputable members of the large but short-lived family to which it belonged.  Langholm had not felt lonely in the breathing spaces between the later chapters.  On the contrary, he would walk up and down among his roses with the animated face of one on the happy heights of intercourse with a kindred spirit, when in reality he was quite alone.  But the man wrote novels, and withal believed in them at the time of writing.  It was true that on one occasion, when the Steels came to tea, the novelist walked his garden with the self-same radiant face with which he had lately taken to walking it alone; but that also was natural enough.

The change came on the very day he finished his book, when Langholm made himself presentable and rode off to the garden-party at Hornby Manor in spirits worthy of the occasion.  About seven of the same evening he dismounted heavily in the by-lane outside the cottage, and pushed his machine through the wicket, a different man.  A detail declared his depression to the woman next door, who was preparing him a more substantial meal than Langholm ever thought of ordering for himself:  he went straight through to his roses without changing his party coat for the out-at-elbow Norfolk jacket in which he had spent 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!