t to make this announcement, but the sight
of his own gateway destroyed his reserve.

"Well, you'll have a fine night, that's one good job," Mr. Godbold
predicted.

"And the moon only just past the full," said Guy.

"That's right," Mr. Godbold agreed; and the tenant passed through the
gateway into the garden, where every path had its own melody of running
water. He examined with proprietary solicitude the espaliers of
apple-trees, and admired for the twentieth time the pledge they offered
by their fantastic forms of his garden's antiquity. He pinched several
pippins that seemed ripe, but they were still hard; and he could find
nothing over which to exert his lordship until he saw by the edge of
the path a piece of groundsel. Having solemnly exterminated the weed,
Guy felt that the garden must henceforth recognize him as master, and he
walked on through a mass of dropsical cabbages and early kale until he
came face to face with the house, the sudden view of which like this
never failed to give him a peculiar pleasure. The tangled garden, long
and narrow, was bounded on the right, as one entered, by the Greenrush,
over which hung a thicket of yews that completely shut out the first
straggling houses of Wychford. On the left the massed espaliers ended
abruptly in a large water-meadow reaching to the foot of the hill along
which the highroad climbed in a slow diagonal. By the corner of the
house the garden had narrowed to the apex of a thin triangle, so that
the windows looked out over the water-meadow and, beyond, up the wide
valley of the Greenrush to where the mighty western sky rested on
rounded hills. At this apex the Greenrush flung a tributary stream to
wash the back of the house and one side of the orchard, whence it wound
in extravagant curves towards the easterly valley. The main branch,
damned up to form a deep and sluggish mill-stream, flowed straight on,
dividing Guy's domain from the churchyard. At the end of the orchard on
this side was a lock-gate through which a certain amount of water
continuously escaped from the mill-stream, enough, indeed, to make the
orchard an island, as it trickled in diamonded shallows to reinforce the
idle tributary. Somewhere in the farther depths of the eastern valley
all vagrant waters were united, and somewhere still more remote they
came to a confluence with their father the Thames.

Guy sat upon the parapet of the well under the shade of a sycamore-tree
and regarded with