June is the month for the old world garden that holds mystery and fragrance within its red-brick walls. In Lombard Street you would suspect no wealth of flowers, and yet in the passing through of one of those solid, mellow, Georgian houses you might meet dreams from the bourn of a charmed sleep.

Aloofness is the note of such a garden. It is no piece of pompous mosaic-work spread before the front windows of a stock-broker’s villa, a conventional color scheme to impress the public. The true garden has no studied ostentation. It is a charm apart, a quiet corner of life smelling of lavender, built for old books, and memories that have the mystery of hills touched by the dawn. You will find the monk’s-hood growing in tall campaniles ringing a note of blue; columbines, fountains of gold and red; great tumbling rose-trees like the foam of the sea; stocks all a-bloom; pansies like antique enamel-work; clove-pinks breathing up incense to meet the wind-blown fragrance of elder-trees in flower. You may hear birds singing as though in the wild deeps of a haunted wood whose trees part the sunset into panels of living fire.

Mary of the plain face and the loyal heart had opened the green front door to a big man, whose broad shoulders seemed fit to bear the troubles of the whole town. He had asked for Catherine and her husband.

“They are in the garden, sir.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, only Master Jack.”

Canon Stensly bowed his iron-gray head under the Oriental curtain that screened the passage leading from the hall to the garden.

“Thanks; I know the way.”

The Rector of St. Antonia’s came out into the sunlight, and stood looking about him for an instant with the air of a man whose eyes were always open to what was admirable in life. A thrush had perched itself on the pinnacle of a yew, and was singing his vesper-song with the broad west for an altar of splendid gold. The chiming of the hour rang from St. Antonia’s steeple half hid by the green mist of its elms. A few trails of smoke rising from red-brick chimney-stacks alone betrayed the presence of a town.

To an old college-man such an evening brought back memories of sunny courts, cloisters, and sleek lawns, the ringing of bells towards sunset, the dark swirl of a river under the yawn of bridges that linked gardens to gardens beneath the benisons of mighty trees. Yet the light on Canon Stensly’s face was not wholly a placid light. It was as though he came as a messenger from the restless, bickering outer world, a friend whom friendship freighted with words not easy to be said.

A glimmer of white under an old cherry-tree showed where Catherine sat reading, with the boy Jack prone on the grass, the Swiss Family Robinson under his chin. Murchison was lying back in a deck-chair, watching the smoke from his pipe amid the foliage overhead.

Master Jack, rolling from elbow to elbow, as he thrilled over the passage of the “tub-boat” from the wreck, caught sight of the Canon crossing the lawn. Catherine was warned by a tug at her skirts, and a very audible stage-aside.

“Look out, here’s old Canon Stensly—”

“S-sh, Jack.”

“Should like to see him afloat in a tub-boat. Take a big—”

A tweak of the ear nipped the boy’s reflection in the bud. His father gave him a significant push in the direction of the fruit garden.

“See if there are any strawberries ripe.”

“I’ve looked twice, dad.”

“Oh, no doubt. Go and look again.”

Canon Stensly’s big fist had closed on Catherine’s fingers. He was not the conventional figure, the portly, smiling cleric, the man of the world with a benignant yet self-sufficient air. Like many big men, silent and peculiarly sensitive, his quiet manner suggested a diffidence anomalous in a man of six feet two. To correct the impression one had but to look at the steady blue of the eye, the firm yet sympathetic mouth, the stanchness of the chin. It is a fallacy that lives perennially, the belief that a confident face, an aggressive manner, and much facility of speech necessarily mark the man of power.

A courtly person would have remarked on the beauty of the evening, and discovered something in the garden to praise. Canon Stensly was not a man given to pleasant commonplaces. He said nothing, and sat down.

Murchison handed him his cigar-case.

“Thanks, not before dinner.”

His habit of silence, the silence of a man who spoke only when he had something definite to say, gave him, to strangers, an expression of reserve. Canon Stensly invariably made talkative men feel uncomfortable. It was otherwise with people who had learned to know the nature of his sincerity.

“Hallo, what literature have we here?”

He picked up Jack’s discarded book, and turned over the pages as though the illustrations brought back recollections of his own youth. As a boy he had been the most irrepressible young mischief-monger, a youngster whom Elisha would have bequeathed to the bear’s claws.

“Ever a member of the Robinson family, Mrs. Murchison?”

Catherine caught a suspicious side glint in his eye.

“I suppose all children read the book.”

“I wonder how much of the moralizing you remember?”

“Very little, I’m afraid.”

“Nor do I. Children demand life—not moralizing upon life,” and the Canon scrutinized a picture portraying the harpooning of a turtle, as though he had gloated over that picture many times as a boy.

Catherine had caught a glimpse of Mary’s white apron signalling for help in some domestic problem. She was glad of the excuse to leave the two men together. The sense of a woman is never more in evidence than when she surrenders her husband to a friend.

“Can you spare me half an hour for a talk?”

“I am not overburdened with work—yet.”

“Oh, it will come.”

He turned over the pages deliberately, glancing at each picture.

“Your wife looks well.”

“Yes, in spite of everything.”

“A matter of heart and pluck.”

“She has the courage of a Cordelia.”

Canon Stensly put the book down upon the grass. The two men were silent awhile; Murchison lying back in his chair, smoking; the churchman leaning forward a little with arms folded, his massive face set rather sternly in the repose of thought.

“There is something I want to talk to you about.”

Murchison turned his head, but did not move his body.

“Yes?”

“Don’t set me down as a busybody. I think I have a duty to you as a friend. It is ............