Mr. Welles tipped his pale, quiet face back to look up at the great tree, stretching its huge, stiff old limbs mutilated by time and weather, across the tiny, crystal brook dimpling and smiling and murmuring among its many-colored pebbles.  “Queer, isn’t it,” he speculated, “how old the tree has grown, and how the brook has stayed just as young as ever.”

“It’s the other way around between ‘Gene Powers’ house and his pine-tree,” commented Aunt Hetty.  “The pine-tree gets bigger and finer and stronger all the time, seems ’sthough, and the house gets more battered and feeble-looking.”

Marise looked across at Marsh and found his eyes on her with an expression she rarely saw in them, almost a peaceful look, as of a man who has had something infinitely satisfying fall to his lot.  He smiled at her gently, a good, quiet smile, and looked away into the extravagant splendor of a row of peonies.

Marise felt an inexplicable happiness, clear and sunny like the light in the old garden.  She sat down on the bench and fell into a more relaxed and restful pose than she had known for some time.  What a sweet and gracious thing life could be after all!  Could there be a lovelier place on earth than here among Cousin Hetty’s flower-children.  Dear old Cousin Hetty, with her wrinkled, stiff exterior, and those bright living eyes of hers.  She was the willow-tree outside and the brook inside, that’s what she was.  What tender childhood recollections were bound up with the sight of that quiet old face.

“And those rose-bushes,” continued the old woman, “are all cuttings my great-great-grandmother brought up from Connecticut, and they came from cuttings our folks brought over from England, in 1634.  If ’twas a little later in the season, and they were in bloom, you’d see how they’re not nearly so I double as most roses.  The petals are bigger and not so curled up, more like wild roses.”

She sat down beside the others on the long wooden bench, and added, “I never dig around one of those bushes, nor cut a rose to put in a vase, without I feel as though Great-great-grandmother and Grandmother and all the rest were in me, still alive.”

“Don’t you think,” asked Marise of the two men, “that there is something awfully sweet about feeling yourself a part of the past generations, like that?  As we do here.  To have such a familiarity with any corner of the earth . . . well, it seems to me like music, the more familiar it is, the dearer and closer it is . . . and when there are several generations of familiarity back of you. . . .  I always feel as though my life were a part of something much bigger than just my life, when I feel it a continuation of their lives, as much as of my own childhood.  It always seems deep and quieting to me.”

Mr. Welles assented wistfully, “It makes me envious.”