"Why were you crying, out in the road?"
"Was I crying?"
"Well, not crying exactly: but you looked as if you wanted to."
She smiled. "We both have our secrets it seems; and you shall tell me yours to-morrow. Will yours let you sleep?"
"I think so, Miss Isabel. I am so tired—and so clean—and this bed is so soft—" I stretched out my arms luxuriously, and almost before I knew it she was bending to kiss me, and they were about her neck. Her hair fell over me in a shower and in the shade of it she laughed happily, kissing me by the ear and whispering, "I have my happy secret, too!"
She straightened herself up, tossed back the dark locks with curved sweep of arm and wrist, and moved to the door.
"Good night, Harry Revel!"
A bird was cheeping in the jasmine bush when I dropped asleep, and when I awoke he was cheeping there still. Of my dreams I only remember that they ended in a vague sense of discomfort, somehow arising from a vision of Mr. Rogers in the act of throwing bread at the swans, and of the hen bird's flurry as she paddled away. But the sound which I took for the splashing of water came in fact from the rings of the window curtain, which Miss Isabel was drawing to shut out the high morning sun.
She heard me stir and faced about, with her hand yet on the curtain. "Awake?" she cried, and laughed. "You shall have a basin of bread-and-milk presently: and after that you may get up and put on these." She held out a suit of clothes which lay across her arm. "I have borrowed them from Miss Belcher, who distributes all sorts of garments at Christmas among the youngsters hereabouts, and has rummaged this out of her stock. And after that my father will be glad to make your acquaintance. We shall find him in the garden. Now I must go and see to preparing dinner: for it is past noon, though you may not know it."
Behold me, half an hour later, clad in a blue jacket very tight at the elbows and corduroy breeches very tight at the knees and warm for the time of year, as I descended with Isabel into the walled garden at the back of the cottage. Its whole area cannot have been an acre, and even so the half of it was taken up by a plot of turf, smooth as a bowling green: but beyond this stretched a miniature orchard, and along the walls ran two deep borders crowded with midsummer flowers— tall white lilies and Canterbury bells; stocks, sweet williams, mignonette, candytuft and larkspurs; bushes of lemon verbena, myrtle, and the white everlasting pea. Near the house all was kept in nicest order, with trim ranks of standard roses marching level with the turfed verges, and tall carnations staked and bending towards them across the alley: but around the orchard all grew riotous. The orchard ended in a maze of currant bushes, through which the path seemed to wander after the sound of running water till it emerged upon another clearing of turf, with a tall filbert tree, and a summer-house beneath it, and a row of beehives set beside a stream. The stream, I afterwards learned, came down from Miss Belcher's park, and was the real boundary of the garden: but Miss Belcher had allowed the Major to build a wall for privacy, on the far side of it, yet not so high as to shut off the sun from his bee-skeps; and had granted him a private entrance through it to the park—a narrow wooden door approached by a miniature bridge across the stream.