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When the actual day came for him to go Gervase felt sorry enough. The roses in the Parsonage garden were all in flower, and he trod sadly between them to where his brother's coach stood waiting. He was sorry to leave the brightness and independence of his little house. At Conster, instead of roses there were trees—great, solemn trees, nodding and scraping against the windows, giving shadow and shelter instead of colour and perfume. The Alard who had rebuilt Conster in 1571 had planted it handsomely with evergreen-pines and yews and cedars of Libanus, to stand inside its outer ring of oaks. He had planted them as so many plant trees, without ever thinking of their growing or realizing how much longer they would live than he. In his day they had been saplings, maintaining summer in winter with their green foliage: now they had grown higher than the roof and some leaned nodding over it, while others laced their boughs into a dense green wall. In front of the house a space had been cleared, but round the back and sides was darkness—heavy crests, branches thrust forward against windows, trunks pale and gnarled among bushy shadows. . . . Gervase was glad to hear the gallybird at work in them and to remember that it never attacks a sound tree. Some day he would persuade Charles to have them all cleared away.