, and everything at
Coombe Oaks upstairs in the bedrooms had a faint, delicious lavender
perfume. There is nothing else that smells so sweet and clean and dry.
You cannot imagine a damp sheet smelling of lavender.

Iden himself liked lavender, and used to rub it between his finger and
thumb in the garden, as he did, too, with the black-currant leaves and
walnut-leaves, if he fancied anything he had touched might have left an
unpleasant odour adhering to his skin. He said it cleaned his hands as
much as washing them.

Iden liked Mrs. Iden to like lavender because his mother had been so
fond of it, and all the sixteen carved oak-presses which had been so
familiar to him in boyhood were full of a thick atmosphere of the
plant.

Long since, while yet the honeymoon bouquet remained in the wine of
life, Iden had set a hedge of lavender to please his wife. It was so
carefully chosen, and set, and watched, that it grew to be the finest
lavender in all the country. People used to come for it from round
about, quite certain of a favourable reception, for there was nothing so
sure to bring peace at Coombe Oaks as a mention of lavender.

But the letter from the Flammas was the great event--from London, all
that way, asking for some Coombe Oaks lavender! Then there was billing
and cooing, and fraternising, and sunshine in the garden over the hedge
of lavender. If only it could have lasted! Somehow, as people grow older
there seems so much grating of the wheels.

In time, long time, people's original feelings get strangely confused
and overlaid. The churchwardens of the eighteenth century plastered the
fresco paintings of the fourteenth in their churches--covered them over
with yellowish mortar. The mould grows up, and hides the capital of the
fallen column; the acanthus is hidden in earth. At the foot of the oak,
where it is oldest, the bark becomes dense and thick, impenetrable, and
without sensitiveness; you may cut off an inch thick without reaching
the sap. A sort of scale or caking in long, long time grows over
original feelings.

There was no one in the world so affectionate and loving as Mrs.
Iden--no one who loved a father so dearly; just as Amaryllis loved _her_
father.

But after they had lived at Coombe Oaks thirty years or so, and the
thick dull bark had grown, after the scales or caking had come upon the
heart, after the capital of the column had fallen, after the painting
had been blurred, it came about that o