When he'd gone I turned down the lamp and peeped out of the window and saw that it was moonlight. All the flowers I love so in the day-time were still waiting in the garden—waiting for Michael. In the bright moonlight I could see all sorts of funny things that I have never seen before. There was a little elf in the laburnum tree making yellow tassels, another was stamping out stars from a bit of cloud and throwing them on to the clematis, and a third was taking off the bracken's curl papers. Just as I was thinking I had better try to go to sleep, I saw a little old woman with a face like a rosy, wrinkled apple walking down the garden path. She was in a great hurry and rather cross.
'How people can expect me to make scent,' she said, 'with no flowers. Ah, this is better,' and she looked round the garden with great satisfaction. 'I remember now, this one's always nice.' Then she began to gather flowers and somehow I didn't mind a bit, though usually I should very much object if some unauthorised person came into the garden unbidden. She pulled bits of lilac and a great deal of honeysuckle, some bluebells, and an armful of wallflowers, lilies of the valley, and such a lot of primroses, and threw them into a still, which I never remember noticing in the garden before. Then she damped them with dewdrops and threw in more flowers—daffodils and gorse-blooms (the thorns didn't prick her fingers, though her hands were very white and soft.) Then more primroses and a few late violets, honeysuckle, and bluebells. She added just a wisp of wood smoke, too, from a bonfire and some damp earth and a shower of rain, and stirred the mixture with a sunbeam. She laughed softly and her voice sounded like a faint breeze rippling over the tree tops. Then she walked, or perhaps she floated, round the garden, and on every bush and tree she scattered little showers and sprays of scent, so that I could smell not just one thing like lilac or bluebell, but a delicious harmony of flowers, wet earth, and rain. She looked up at me as she went out of the garden and laughed.
'It will last till he comes in the morning.'
And I smiled back because I loved that dear Dame Nature. When Nannie came to wake me she said,—
'How sweet the garden smells. Hasn't the laburnum and clematis come out in the night? I suppose it's the rain, Meg.'
But I knew better!
Then Michael came, prepared, I think, to interview a Bench of Bishops, but found—my father—who remarked later in the day,—
'Well, he doesn't eat with his knife, Meg, and he—um—seems to know his own mind, too. I don't think that "gentle knight" would have desired to go into a Monastery if his ladye had refused him the first time he asked her.'
Now how on earth did father guess that?
And I smiled to myself as I wondered if 'you belong to me' could conceivably be considered by a Bench of Bishops as the speech of a gentle knight 'asking' his ladye.