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“I suppose I ought to thank him,” thought Philomène, feeling painfully shy, but Sweet William rattled on and left her no time.

“You have probably no idea how much work even a small garden like this entails. I have to attend to the housing of all the live creatures, for one thing, the bees and snails and birds and caterpillars and so on. The flowers are not troublesome, for they stay in one place for quite a long time, but the spiders, for instance, are for ever moving house.”

“It must be very interesting work,” said Philomène politely. She had often heard people make this remark to her father.

“Not bad,” said Sweet William, “if one keeps one’s eyes and ears open. From being the agent in a big garden, just about a hundred and fifty years ago, I once pieced together a whole love-story. It was an old manor-house, and had a very fine garden.”

“That is the sort of place I should love to live in,” said Philomène, “with oriel windows and avenues and things.”

“It is a modern failing to find fault with one’s surroundings,” said Sweet William pompously, “and young people are especially prone to it. As I was saying when you interrupted me, it was a fine garden. The family was very old and very proud, and they kept a peacock on the terrace. On one side of the lawn ran a green walk and a clipped yew-hedge, and it was here that my lovers used to walk, up and down, up and down, at sunset. The hedge overheard every word of what they said, for you see, being a hedge he could not very well help eavesdropping. Well, one day they had to say good-bye, and he went away and left her very sad, and I got to know all about that part of it from a red rose, which he had picked that last evening, and the girl had pressed the rose in a big book, and every day she would sit and read in the book, and would look at the page where the red rose lay. ‘My beloved is mine, and I am his.’ The rose told me that she had grown desperately tired of having nothing but this one sentence to read, but the girl never seemed to tire of it. Then at last her lover came back for her, and they went away together to the little harbour near by, and one of Mother Carey’s chickens told me that they were married in the church on the cliff. After that I heard no more of them for some time, till one day I chanced to pick up a sea-shell on the beach near the harbour. I had had no tidings of the mer-folk for ever such a long while, so I put the shell to my ear and let the sea tell me some, and amongst other things it told me about those two, and how they had taken ship for the south. The last news I had of them was from the wind, for he is such a great traveller that he seldom loses sight of people, but the worst of him is that like most travellers he is always in a hurry, so he could only stop to tell me that he had seen them last in another garden, walking up and down an avenue of cypresses with bits of broken statues on either side; only he was not holding her hand this time, for she was carrying a white bundle in her arms. The wind had not waited to find out its precise nature, but he had overheard a few of their remarks as he went by, and would you believe it, they were just exactly the same as those which the yew-hedge had repeated to me.”