LITMIR.BIZ

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not shady and secluded as when I used to pace it in dusk and dark with the earliest of those fairy emissaries that come to a girl when she is passing into her teens… For the peculiar charm of this garden is that it was the scene of the great transition.

      Here I received my first proposal. Heavens! what a shock it gave me. In fact I was horrified and terrified out of my wits. It came in a letter surreptitiously conveyed to me through servants. "I love you with my whole heart. Dare I hope that I am loved in return?" – the startling words were but the commencement of a long outpouring, but I was so frightened by them that I dared not read another. In frantic haste I destroyed the letter, and thereafter went in fear and dread of the writer – quite a grown man to me, perhaps eighteen – as of an ogre waiting to devour me. I may point out, by the way, that it is a mistake not to read letters through – one that I did not make again. This unread letter contained a request that I would, if I favoured my lover's suit, indicate the same to him by a certain sign that he alone would understand, and in my ignorance I made that sign, placing myself where he could find me, when all my aim was to get as far away from him as possible. How I hated him for his attentions no words can tell. On the other hand I rather "cottoned" to a brother of his, who did not write me love-letters. For little girls do cotton to little boys, and vice versa, and why not? "I confess I get consolation … in seeing the artless little girls walking after the boys to whom they incline … this is as it should be," said Thackeray, writing of children's parties. But the boy to whom I was secretly inclined was never aware of the compliment paid him, and, almost before I was aware of it myself, he was sadly removed from my path by an accidental gun-shot. And the boy who inclined, much more than inclined, to me I took every precaution that was in my power never to speak to again. I cannot remember that I ever did so.

      But the reader who knows anything at all of human nature does not need to be told that when I found myself in D – again, after an interval of nearly half-a-century, my inclination was rather to see him than to avoid him. It would be a piquant moment, I felt, that of meeting now, if his memory of early happenings was as good in old age as mine; even although no reference to them should be permitted. I quite looked forward to it.

      But it was not to be. Although I had nothing to be ashamed of in connection with him – very much to the contrary – I did not mention his name to anybody, also I need not say that I kept to myself the little affair that had been between us; I merely held an ear cocked for casual information. And it ended with my leaving D – without having any news of him, not knowing even whether he was alive or dead.

      But later I dropped across one of his sisters, a widow, who had become connected by marriage with my husband's family. One day we went in a little party to the town where she lived and she entertained us to tea. I sat beside her at table, and inevitably we gossiped of our young days throughout the meal. She told me what had become of her several brothers and sisters, and so as last I heard of the one in whom I was interested.

      "I have just had a letter from him," said she, no trace in her face or voice of any knowledge of the ancient secret. "I told him that you were in England, and he wishes me to give you his kindest remembrances and to say he is very sorry not to be able to see you." I forget where she said he lived, but it was in some far-away county; married, of course, with grown-up children – no doubt grandchildren – as I have.

      CHAPTER IV

      THE HOME OF CHILDHOOD

      There was another old home – an earlier one – that on my first walk in D – I went to look at. Its associations were even more keenly dear, and archæologically it was immensely the most interesting.

      I was astonished to see how very, very old it was, and for the first time was curious about its evidently extensive history. There was a monastic suggestion in its thick walls and crow-stepped gables, and the oaken door exactly like a church door, and the peculiar irregularity of the grouping of its parts. Nothing was changed, except that a horrid little office had been built into a corner that was once a sunless well between masonry, containing only evergreen shrubs and a dense mat of lilies-of-the-valley; but the office was an excrescence so glaringly alone by itself that one could treat it as if it were a tradesman's cart awaiting orders. Nothing else seemed to have been altered; even the bay-tree, from which we gathered leaves to flavour cookings, stood in the little front court as of yore, and the old ivy was, I am sure, the old ivy of fifty, possibly a hundred, if not a thousand, years ago. I viewed the place now with instructed eyes, which told me that half-a-century was a mere fraction of its age.

      The guide-book says nothing about it. Old dwelling-houses are too thick on the ground in England to have any distinction unconnected with famous persons and events; this was no more to the town of D – in 1908 than it was to us when we left it for the modern four-square house with the pillared portico and stone lions on the lawn, down there near the station. At neither time was there a doubt of the latter's incomparable superiority.

      But I had come from the land of the raw and new, the domain of the social vagrant and the speculative builder, and I could appreciate the charm of this relic of antiquity, for the first time. I stood at the gate, and tried to think how it had come there. The clue was in the name of the lane beside it – Priory Road – and in the guide-book statement that the fine old rectory, in the gardens of which we used to lose arrows and balls over the wall dividing it from ours, stood "on the site of a Benedictine Priory."

      Then I tried to reconstruct the plan of the interior, and remembered that the floor under the cocoanut matting of the dining-room was of cold stone slabs; the passages the same, and I think there was a press of black wood, that became store cupboards, built into an end of that room. Entering the arched front door, of such pronounced ecclesiastical design, mother's store-room was the first thing you came to, a room that opened out of the front hall on your right hand. Passing through that hall and opening the door that faced you, you were dropped straight into the drawing-room down a short flight of steps. One window of that apartment looked out towards the road (I fancy the excrescent office blocked it); another, and a door, opened directly upon the garden, gravelled nearly all over, with, at one side, a group of large and very old yew-trees, roofing a circular wooden bench. In the right-hand drawing-room wall a third door opened, at the top of another flight of steps, into what we called the music-room – really a cosier sitting-room, incidentally enclosing the piano, and without so many draughts in it; and a fourth door in a fourth wall led you into the stone-flagged passage connecting with our refectory and the domestic offices, and to the foot of the staircase. Surely that plan was never drawn with a view to the convenience of a lay family!

      Upstairs the arrangement was still more unconventional, although it may have been conventual, for aught I know. That window over the arched main entrance – it was open, and its muslin curtains fluttering in the breeze – belonged to one of three rooms so tucked into the many-cornered structure that they described a sort of triangle; one was hemmed in by two, the only way in and out being through one or other of those two, which also intercommunicated, the point of common junction being a sort of square entry place, having the three doors in its panelled sides. For some reason the inmost, which was also to the person in the road the outermost, room was reserved as a guest chamber – the aunts used it; but once it was given to a male visitor, who wanted to be out early. His dilemma was a cruel one, seeing that his window was in a sheer wall and he had no rope ladder. He could gain freedom only through my parents' room or through that occupied by their daughters, now grown from babies to little girls. After long listening in our joint vestibule, he chose the former path, as the least of two evils; but, although he crept on stockinged feet, my mother was awake. She made some alterations after that. It seems to me they should have been made before.

      Over that window above the front door another and smaller window looked down on me. I met its gaze with a shrinking eye and the cold creeps down my back – yes, even after all those years and years! You reached the little sloping walled room behind it through a suite of attics at the top of dark and lonely stairs; the first room was the servants', who, however, were not there when I went to bed; the next had only ghosts in it, and the locked door of a lumber-room out of which I nightly expected some shape of horror to spring forth on me as I breathlessly scurried past; the last – with this window in it – was where I slept with my governess.

      Seven governesses in succession reigned over us, for in my circle

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