held loyally to its business of guarding the borders, Philip shifted his gaze slowly, lingering over the dim contours, the shadowy shape of what the garden had been.  Suddenly his eyes opened wide.  How was this?  There was a hedge as neat, as clipped, as any of Southampton in mid-season, and over it a glory of roses, red and white and pink and yellow, waved gay banners to him in trim luxuriance.  He swung toward them, and the breeze brought him for the first time in his life the fragrance of box in sunshine.

Four feet tall, shaven and thick and shining, the old hedge stood, and the garnered sweetness of a hundred years’ slow growth breathed delicately from it toward the great-great-grandson of the man who planted it.  A box hedge takes as long in the making as a gentleman, and when they are done the two are much of a sort.  No plant in all the garden has so subtle an air of breeding, so gentle a reserve, yet so gracious a message of sweetness for all of the world who will stop to learn it.  It keeps a firm dignity under the stress of tempest when lighter growths are tossed and torn; it shines bright through the snow; it has a well-bred willingness to be background, with the well-bred gift of presence, whether as background or foreground.  The soul of the box-tree is an aristocrat, and the sap that runs through it is the blue blood of vegetation.

Saluting him bravely in the hot sunshine with its myriad shining sword-points, the old hedge sent out to Philip on the May breeze its ancient welcome of aromatic fragrance, and the tall roses crowded gayly to look over its edge at the new master.  Slowly, a little dazed at this oasis of shining order in the neglected garden, he walked to the opening and stepped inside the hedge.  The rose garden!  The famous rose garden of Fairfield, and as his mother had described it, in full splendor of cared-for, orderly bloom.  Across the paths he stepped swiftly till he stood amid the roses, giant bushes of Jacqueminot and Marechal Niel; of pink and white and red and yellow blooms in thick array.  The glory of them intoxicated him.  That he should own all of this beauty seemed too good to be true, and instantly he wanted to taste his ownership.  The thought came to him that he would enter into his heritage with strong hands here in the rose garden; he caught a deep-red Jacqueminot almost roughly by its gorgeous head and broke off the stem.  He would gather a bunch, a huge, unreasonable bunch of his own flowers.  Hungrily he broke one after another; his shoulders bent over them, he was deep in the bushes.

“I reckon I shall have to ask you not to pick any more of those roses,” a voice said.

Philip threw up his head as if he had been shot; he turned sharply with a great thrill, for he thought his mother spoke to him.  Perhaps it was only the Southern inflection so long unheard, perhaps the sunlight that shone in his eyes dazzled him, but, as he stared, the white figure before him seemed to him to look exactly as his mother had looked long ago.  Stumbling over his words, he caught at the first that came.