She turned her face.  His was at her shoulder.

“How could you ever have left it?” she asked reproachfully.

She voiced his own regrets, which the crowding memories had awakened.

“I don’t know,” he answered, not without emotion.  “I have often asked myself that question.”  He crossed over to the railing of the porch, swung about, and looked at her.  Her eyes were still on the picture.  “I can imagine you in that garden,” he said.

Did the garden cast the spell by which she saw herself on the seat? or was it Chiltern’s voice?  She would indeed love and cherish it.  And was it true that she belonged there, securely infolded within those peaceful walls?  How marvellously well was Thalia playing her comedy!  Which was the real, and which the false?  What of true value, what of peace and security was contained in her present existence?  She had missed the meaning of things, and suddenly it was held up before her, in a garden.

A later hour found them in Honora’s runabout wandering northward along quiet country roads on the eastern side of the island.  Chiltern, who was driving, seemed to take no thought of their direction, until at last, with an exclamation, he stopped the horse; and Honora beheld an abandoned mansion of a bygone age sheltered by ancient trees, with wide lands beside it sloping to the water.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Beaulieu,” he replied.  “It was built in the seventeenth century, I believe, and must have been a fascinating place in colonial days.”  He drove in between the fences and tied the horse, and came around by the side of the runabout.  “Won’t you get out and look at it?”

She hesitated, and their eyes met as he held out his hand, but she avoided it and leaped quickly to the ground neither spoke as they walked around the deserted house and gazed at the quaint facade, broken by a crumbling, shaded balcony let in above the entrance door.  No sound broke the stillness of the summer’s day—­a pregnant stillness.  The air was heavy with perfumes, and the leaves formed a tracery against the marvellous blue of the sky.  Mystery brooded in the place.  Here, in this remote paradise now in ruins, people had dwelt and loved.  Thought ended there; and feeling, which is unformed thought, began.  Again she glanced at him, and again their eyes met, and hers faltered.  They turned, as with one consent, down the path toward the distant water.  Paradise overgrown!  Could it be reconstructed, redeemed?

In former days the ground they trod had been a pleasance the width of the house, bordered, doubtless, by the forest.  Trees grew out of the flower beds now, and underbrush choked the paths.  The box itself, that once primly lined the alleys, was gnarled and shapeless.  Labyrinth had replaced order, nature had reaped her vengeance.  At length, in the deepening shade, they came, at what had been the edge of the old terrace, to the daintiest of summer-houses, crumbling too, the shutters off their hinges, the floor-boards loose.  Past and gone were the idyls of which it had been the stage.