The Garden of Memories

by Henry St. John Cooper

"I do not think that I have given the garden a thought."

"Yet is it not beautiful enough? And to think that a few months ago it was little more than a jungle and now——"

"It is beautiful, yet I knew another infinitely more beautiful to me than this. You knew that garden too, Kathleen, our garden at Bishopsholme, the garden where I used to wait for you, where I first told you——" his voice quavered and trembled and her eyes, downcast, dared not lift themselves to his face.

"Where I first told you how I loved you—I have seen that garden in my dreams a thousand times, I have had cool visions of it in the sweltering heat of the tropical nights. I have seen it—and you—always you—and yet my memory never did you justice Kathleen. To-day you are more beautiful, more sweetly gracious, more lovable——"

"Hush!" she said.

"Why should I be silent when silence would be but pretence? Ten years ago I loved you with all my heart and soul, for ten years my love has been constant, my dreams and my memories of you were sweeter to me than the living realty of other women—I cared nothing for them, my heart was all yours."

"Harold!" she said. "Harold!" She put her hand on his arm. "The past is dead and it must lie dead and—and forgotten——"

"Forgotten! You tell me to forget when I have lived on memories, when the visions of you that my brain has conjured up have been the only real, the only beautiful things in my life: have I not heard your voice speaking to me in the stillness of those hot nights, have I not felt your cool hand on my brow when fever assailed me? You, even though thousands of miles parted us, were with me always. You were by my side in daylight and in darkness, my other self, my better, purer, sweeter self, and now after ten years when all that I had of you, all that I had in the world was memory of you, you tell me to forget——"

"Because you must," she said softly, "because—oh because you must."

"And did you forget? Could you have forgotten at the word of command?" he said. His cheeks were flushed under their tan, his eyes were gleaming and his words came quick and fast. "Could you have forgotten so easily? No, you too were faithful, you waited, Kathleen. You told me so yourself. You waited—hoping, dear, did you not, hoping that I should come back to you as, God willing, I meant always to come back. You knew as I knew that it was the great love, the one and only love of our two lives. It came to you, dear, when you were little more than a child, to me when I was but a boy, but it will last through my life and yours—yours too, and knowing this, you tell me to forget."