She rose to her knees, and curled her arm around the dog’s neck; then, with a long sigh, stood up, and asked of herself if this were the way to the house.  She had never seen the house at close range, had never been in this walled garden.  It was from Williamsburgh that the minister had taken her to his home, eleven years before.  Sometimes from the river, in those years, she had seen, rising above the trees, the steep roof and the upper windows; sometimes upon the creek she had gone past the garden wall, and had smelled the flowers upon the other side.

In her lonely life, with the beauty of the earth about her to teach her that there might be greater beauty that she yet might see with a daily round of toil and sharp words to push her to that escape which lay in a world of dreams, she had entered that world, and thrived therein.  It was a world that was as pure as a pearl, and more fantastic than an Arabian tale.  She knew that when she died she could take nothing out of life with her to heaven.  But with this other world it was different, and all that she had or dreamed of that was fair she carried through its portals.  This house was there.  Long closed, walled in, guarded by tall trees, seen at far intervals and from a distance, as through a glass darkly, it had become to her an enchanted spot, about which played her quick fancy, but where her feet might never stray.

But now the spell which had held the place in slumber was snapped, and her feet was set in its pleasant paths.  She moved down the alley between the lines of box, and the greyhound went with her.  The branches of a walnut-tree drooped heavily across the way; when she had passed them she saw the house, square, dull red, bathed in sunshine.  A moment, and the walk led her between squat pillars of living green into the garden out of the fairy tale.

Dim, fragrant, and old time; walled in; here sunshiny spaces, there cool shadows of fruit-trees; broken by circles and squares of box; green with the grass and the leaves, red and purple and gold and white with the flowers; with birds singing, with the great silver river murmuring by without the wall at the foot of the terrace, with the voice of a man who sat beneath a cherry-tree reading aloud to himself,—­such was the garden that she came upon, a young girl, and heavy at heart.

She was so near that she could hear the words of the reader, and she knew the piece that he was reading; for you must remember that she was not untaught, and that Darden had books.

    “’When from the censer clouds of fragrance roll,
      And swelling organs lift the rising soul,
      One thought of thee puts all the pomp to flight,
      Priests, tapers, temples, swim before my sight’”—­

The greyhound ran from Audrey to the man who was reading these verses with taste and expression, and also with a smile half sad and half cynical.  He glanced from his page, saw the girl where she stood against the dark pillar of the box, tossed aside the book, and went to her down the grassy path between rows of nodding tulips.  “Why, child!” he said.  “Did you come up like a flower?  I am glad to see you in my garden, little maid.  Are there Indians without?”