“Good morning, my dear,” he said. “I thought I saw you going into this wilderness of ours that we call a kitchen garden, and I followed you in the hopes of having a little chat.”
He was evidently in the best of humours—nothing else could have accounted for this unwonted desire for society, and, in spite of the dark rings under his eyes and the yellow sodden look of his skin, he looked unusually benign and cheerful.
“Perhaps you will take a turn with me round the garden,” he continued affably. “I can see you are not dressed for a longer walk; although I do not for a moment wish to disparage your costume. Indeed, I do not know that I have ever seen you wear anything that became you more than that cap of Willy’s.”
I turned with him, and we walked slowly round the grass-grown paths which followed the square of the walls, stooping every now and then to save our eyes from the unpruned boughs of the apple-trees.
“Dear me! this place is shockingly neglected,” my uncle said, twitching a bramble out of my way with his stick; “in old days it was a very different affair. My mother used to have four men at work here, and I remember well when it was the best garden in the country.”
We had by this time come to the dilapidated old hothouse, and we both stood and looked at it for a few seconds. Through the innumerable broken panes, and under the decaying window-sashes, the branches of a peach-tree thrust themselves out in every direction, as if breaking loose from imprisonment.
“Ah, the poor old peach-house!” said Uncle Dominick, digging a weed out of the path with the heel of his boot—“that was another of my mother’s hobbies. I wish I had the energy and the money to get this whole place put to rights,” he continued, as we walked on again; “but I have neither the one nor the other. I shall leave all that for Willy to do some day; for he is fond of the old place. Do you not think so, my dear?”
“I am sure he is,” I answered, rather absently; my thoughts had strayed away to to-morrow’s ride.
“I suppose you have seen Willy this morning? Did he seem in better spirits than he was in last night? I don’t know that I ever saw him so depressed and silent as he was at dinner,” said my uncle.
“Did you think so?” I replied guiltily. “I think he seemed all right this morning.”