“Who can tell when or whence the doubt may wake again, or what may wake it!”
“At least let me explain a little before you go,” she said.
“Certainly,” he answered, reseating himself, in compliance with her example.
“Miss Graeme told me that you had never seen a garden like theirs before!”
“I never did. There are none such, I fancy, in our part of the country.”
“Nor in our neighbourhood either.”
“Then what is surprising in it?”
“Nothing in that. But is there not something in your being able to write a poem like that about a garden such as you had never seen? One would say you must have been familiar with it from childhood to be able so to enter into the spirit of the place!”
“Perhaps if I had been familiar with it from childhood, that might have disabled me from feeling the spirit of it, for then might it not have looked to me as it looked to those in whose time such gardens were the fashion? Two things are necessary—first, that there should be a spirit in a place, and next that the place should be seen by one whose spirit is capable of giving house-room to its spirit.—By the way, does the ghost-lady feel the place all right?”
“I am not sure that I know what you mean; but I felt the grass with her feet as I read, and the wind lifting my hair. I seemed to know exactly how she felt!”