In that grim procession Dick came last—poor, poor Dick! He had not been wicked, but he had done wicked things. He had betrayed and broken faith. He had made as much desolation and anguish as if he had been hard-hearted. Oh! why did women love men? Why did they trust them?
Annette stood a long time with her face in her hands. Then she went out and closed the door behind her. The sun was shining bravely, and she longed to get out of this death-shadowed house into the warm, living sunshine. She went back to the drawing-room, her quiet step echoing loudly down the passage, and looked out of the long window. But the outlook was not calculated to lessen her oppression.
Close at hand, as she knew, were gracious expanses of sea and sky and gleaming river. But a stone wall surrounded the house, and on the top of it a tall wooden fence had been erected, so high that from the ground floor you could not look over it. This wooden fence came up close to the house on every side, so close that there was only just room for the thin firs and a walnut tree to grow within the narrow enclosure, their branches touching the windows.
Annette did not know that the wall and the fence and the trees were there to protect the house from the east wind, which in winter swept with arctic ferocity from the sea.
In the narrow strip between the fenced wall and the house Mary Deane had tried to make a little garden. Vain effort! The walnut tree and the firs took all sun from the strip of flower-bed against the wall of the house, where a few Michaelmas daisies and snap-dragons hung their heads. She had trained a rose against the wall, but it clung more dead than alive, its weak shoots slipping down from its careful supports. She had made a gravel path beside it, and had paced up and down it. How worn and sunk that path was! There was not room for two to go abreast in it. One footfall had worn that narrow groove, narrow almost as a sheep track in the marsh. And now the path was barely visible for the dead leaves of the walnut, falling untimely, which had drifted across it, and had made an eddy over the solitary clump of yellow snap-dragon.
Annette drew back the bolt of the window, and stepped out. The air, chill with the mist which had silvered everything, was warm compared to the atmosphere of the house.
She drew a long breath, and her mind, never accustomed to dwell long upon herself, was instantly absorbed in freeing the snap-dragon from the dead leaves which had invaded it. Two birds were bathing themselves sedulously in the only sunny corner at the end of the garden. Annette saw that their bath also was choked with leaves, and when she had released the snap-dragon, she applied her energies to the birds' bath.
But she had hardly removed a few leaves from it when she stopped short. It was a day of revelations. The birds' bath was really a lake: a miniature lake with rocks in it, and three tin fishes, rather too large it must be owned to be quite probable, and a tin frog spread out in a swimming attitude, and four ducks all jostling each other on its small expanse. It was a well-stocked lake. Tears rose in Annette's eyes as she explored still farther, lifting the drifted leaves gently one by one.
They covered a doll's garden about a yard square. Some one, not a child, had loved that garden, and had made it for a beloved child. The enclosure with its two-inch fence had no grass in it, but it had winding walks, marked with sand and tiny white stones. And it had a little avenue of French lavender which was actually growing, and which led to the stone steps on the top of which the house stood, flanked by shells. It was a wooden house, perhaps originally a box; of rather debased architecture, it must be conceded. But it had windows and a green door painted on it, and a chimney. On the terrace were two garden-seats, evidently made out of match-boxes; and outside the fence was a realistic pigsty with two china pigs in it, and a water-butt, and a real hay-stack. Close at hand lay a speckled china cow, and near it were two seated crinkly white lambs.
Annette kneeling by the lake, crying silently, was so absorbed in tenderly clearing the dead leaves from the work of art, and in setting the cow on its legs again, that she did not hear a step on the path behind her. Roger had come back and was watching her.