so stern that even Winny saw that there was something
wrong. She knew by the way he let Stanny down from his shoulder to the
ground, a way which implied that Stanny was not so young nor yet so
small and helpless as he seemed. He could walk.

Stanny felt it; he felt it in the jerk that landed him; but he didn't
care, he was far too happy.

"He's a young Turk," said Winny, and he was. By his whole manner, by the
swing of his tiny arms, by his tilted, roguish smile, by his eyes,
impudent and joyous (blue they were, like his mother's, but clear,
tilted, and curled like Ranny's), Stanny intimated that Daddy was sold
if he imagined that to walk was not just what Stanny wanted. And in
spite of it he was heartrending, pathetic; so small he was, with all his
baby roundness accentuated absurdly by the knickers.

"He's just such another as you, Ranny," Winny said. (She was
uncontrollable!) "Such a little man as he is, in those knickers."

"Damn his knickers," said Ranny to himself, behind his set teeth. But he
smiled all the same; and by the time they had got into the wonderful
walled garden of Golder's Hill he had recovered almost completely.

It was not decent to keep on sulking in a place which had so laid itself
out to make you happy; where the sunshine flowed round you and soaked
into you and warmed you as if you were in a bath. The garden, inclosed
in rose-red walls and green hedges, was like a great tank filled with
sunshine; sunshine that was visible, palpable, audible almost in its
intensity; sunshine caught and contained and brimming over, that
quivered and flowed in and around the wall-flowers, tulips and
narcissus, that drenched them through and through and covered them like
water, and was thick with all their scents. You walked on golden paths
through labyrinths of brilliant flowers, through arches, tunnels and
bowers of green. You were netted in sunshine, drugged with sweet live
smells, caged in with blossoms, pink and white, of the espaliers that
clung, branch and bud, like carved latticework, flat to the garden wall.

Neither could he well have sulked in the great space outside, where the
green lawns unrolled and flung themselves generously, joyously to the
sun, or where, on the light slope of the field beyond, the trees hung
out their drooping vans, lifted up green roof above green roof,
sheltering a happy crowd.

And even if these things, in their benignant, admonishing, reminding
beauty, had not restored