“It gives one insight. I like it.”
“It won’t tire you?”
“I think I am a very healthy young woman.”
He looked at the fresh face, and at the lithe though fragile figure, and felt somehow that the June day had an indefinable perfume.
“I should like to show you some of the young conifers.”
They were wonderful trees with wonderful names, quaint, solemn, and diminutive, yet with all the dignity of forests patriarchs. They grew in groves and companies, showing all manner of colours, dense metallic greens, soft blues, golds, silvers, greys, green blacks, ambers. Each tree had beauties and characteristics of its own. They were diminutive models of a future maturity, solemn children that would be cedars, cypresses, junipers, pines and yews.
They delighted Eve.
“Oh, the little people, ready to grow up! I never knew there were such trees—and such colours.”
He saw the same look in her eyes as he had seen in the rosery, the same tenderness about the mouth.
“I walk about here sometimes and wonder where they will all go to.”