ings when she had an appointment
with her lover. Then, pushing through the bushes and past the magnolia
trees she found herself in a little half moonlit space, a natural arbour
through whose roof of leaves the moonlight came in quavering shafts. She
stood for a moment absolutely still whilst her eyes accustomed themselves
to the light. Then she began to search for the seat she guessed to be
there, and found it. It was between an oak bole and the wall of the
garden, and the bushes behind had grown so that their branches half
covered it. Neglected, forsaken, unknown, perhaps, to the people now
living in Vernons it had lingered with the fidelity of inanimate things,
protected by the foliage of the southern garden from prying eyes.

She pushed back the leaves and branches and bent them out of the way, then
she took her seat, and as she did so several of the bent branches released
themselves and closed half round her in a delightful embrace.

From here she could see brokenly the garden and the walk leading from the
gate, with the light of the moon now strong upon the walk. The night
sounds of the street just beyond the wall came mixed with the stir of
foliage as the wind from the sea pressed over the trees like the hand of a
mesmerist inducing sleep.

So it was here that Juliet Mascarene had sat with Rupert Pinckney on those
summer nights when the world was younger, before the war. The war that had
changed everything whilst leaving the roses untouched and the moonlight
the same on the bird-haunted garden of Vernons.

Everything was the same here in this little space of flowers and trees.
But the lovers had vanished.

"For man walketh in a vain shadow and disquieteth himself in vain." The
words strayed across Phyl's mind brought up by recollection. "He cometh up
and is cut down like a flower, he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never
continueth in one stay."

The trees seemed whispering it, the eternal statement that leaves the
eternal question unanswered.

The garden was talking to her, the night, the very bushes that clasped her
in a half embrace; perfumes, moonlight, the voice of the wind, all were
part of the spell that bound her, held her, whispered to her. It was as
though the love letter of Juliet had led her here to show her as in a
glass darkly the vainness of love in the vainness of life.

Vainly, for as she sat watching in imagination the forms of the lost
lovers parting there at the gate, suddenly there cam