"Heartless tyranny!"
"Wasn't it? I didn't know what to do with myself in the long summer evenings. I used to roam about this garden till I was tired, and then I would go and look in at the dining-room window where they were all sitting at dessert, and auntie would wave me away, 'Go and play, child.' Play, indeed! Even the gardeners had gone home, and the dogs were shut up for the night. I was actually glad when it was nine o'clock and bedtime."
"Poor victim of middle-aged egotism."
"Dear auntie! She is so good! But people don't understand children. They forget what their own feelings were when they were little."
"Alas, yes! A child is as great a mystery to me to-day as if I had been born at one and twenty. I can't even understand or interest myself in a lad of fifteen. He seems such an incongruous, unnecessary creature, stupid, lumbering, in everybody's way. I can't realize the fact that he will ever get any better. He is there, complete in himself, a being of a race apart. I should feel insulted if any one were to tell me I had ever been like him."
"How true that is!" assented Suzette, gaily. "I have felt just the same about girls. I only began to wear my hair in a knot three years ago, and yet there seems hardly one point of union between me and a girl with her hair down her back. I have got beyond her, as somebody says. How sad that one should always be getting beyond things! Father detests India—talks only of the climate—while to me it was all enchantment. Perhaps if I were to go back to the East, a few years hence, I should hate it."
"Very likely. Going back is always a mistake."
There was nothing exalted or out of the common in their talk, but at least there was sympathy in it all, and they were telling each other their thoughts as freely as if they had been friends of long years. It was very different from being obliged to talk of Salisbury Cathedral, and theorize on the history of Stonehenge. And then there was the glamour of the garden and the moonlight; the mysterious light and shade of shrubbery walks; the blackness of the cedars that spread a deeper dark across the lawn. Mrs. Mornington had taken care to choose a night when the midsummer moon should be at the full, and she had abstained from cockneyfying the garden with artificial light, from those fairy lamps or Chinese lanterns which are well enough within the narrow limits of a suburban garden, but which could only vulgarize grounds that had something of forestial beauty.
"I am glad you are almost a stranger to Matcham, Miss Vincent," said Allan, after the first brief pause in their talk.
"Why?"