The house stood at right angles to the east end of the Cathedral, from which it was only divided by a strip of turf broken up by fragments of old gray ruins, and edged by an iron railing, and by a paved passage-way, which led through the Dark Entry from the “Green Court,” where the Deanery and Minor Canons’ houses were situated, to the pleasaunce immediately around the Cathedral.  To the green lawns of this wide pleasaunce the houses of the residentiary Canons gave access.  One projecting latticed window of the drawing-room of Mrs. Browning’s house, another of the big bedroom above it, and the windows of the kitchen and the servants’ quarters looked on to the passage-way and the Cathedral; all the other windows looked into an old garden surrounded by a very high brick wall, a garden of green turf like moss, of elm trees, and, in summer, of gay herbaceous borders, a garden to which the voices of the chimes dropped down, and to which the Cathedral organ sent its message, as if to a place that knew how to keep safely all things that were precious.  Even the pure and chill voices of the boy choristers found a way to this hidden garden, in which there were straight and narrow paths, where nuns might have loved to walk unseen of the eyes of men.

The Dean’s widow had left behind all her furniture, and was now adorning a Bournemouth hotel, in which her sprightly invalidism and close knowledge of the investments of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and of the habits and customs of the lesser clergy, were greatly appreciated.  Some of the furniture did not wholly commend itself to Rosamund.  There were certain settees and back-to-backs, certain whatnots and occasional tables, which seemed to stamp the character of the Dean’s widow as meretricious.  But these could easily be “managed.”  Rosamund was enchanted with the house, and went from room to room with Canon Wilton radiantly curious, and almost as excited as a joyous schoolgirl.

“I must poke my nose into everything!” she exclaimed.

And she did it, and made the Canon poke his too.

Presently, opening the lattice of the second window in the big, low-ceiled drawing-room, she leaned out to the moist and secluded garden.  She was sitting sideways on the window-seat, of which she had just said, “I won’t have this dreadful boudoir color on my cushions!” Canon Wilton was standing behind her, and presently heard her sigh gently, and almost voluptuously, as if she prolonged the sigh and did not want to let it go.

“Yes?” he said, with a half-humorous inflection of the voice.

Rosamund looked round gravely.

“Did you say something?”

“Only—­yes?—­in answer to your sigh.”

“Did I?  Yes, I must have.  I was thinking——­”

She hesitated, while he stood looking at her with his strong, steady gray-blue eyes.

“I was thinking of a life I shall never live.”

He came up to the window-seat.