Bradby looked round him at the leaden sky, which showed no signs of a break anywhere. "Perhaps it will clear up," he said. "I didn't suppose you'd be out, but I thought I might as well come up. I want to see what happens with the pipes, and where the water gets to with heavy rain." "Well, you go up and have a look, my boy," said Grafton, "and if you're not drowned beforehand come to breakfast. We might be able to get out afterwards. I'm going back to bed now." He went back to bed and dozed intermittently until his servant came in to call him. The idle thoughts that filled his brain, waking and half-sleeping, were concerned with the rock-garden, with the roses he and Caroline had planted, with other plantings of flowers and shrubs, and the satisfaction that he had already gained or expected to gain from them. The garden came first. In the summer it provided the chief interest of the country, and the pleasure it had brought was at least as great as that to be gained from the sports of autumn and winter. But it was not only the garden as giving these pleasures of contrivance, expectation and satisfaction, that coloured his thoughts as he lay drowsily letting them wander over the aspects of the life he was so much enjoying. It was the great playground, in these rich summer months, when he had usually shunned the English country as lying in its state of quiescence, and affording none of the distractions to be found elsewhere. Lawn tennis and other garden games, with the feeling of fitness they induced, the companionship they brought in the long afternoons when people came to play and talk and enjoy themselves, and the consequent heightening of the physical satisfaction of meals, cool drinks, baths, changing of clothes; the lazy hours in the heat of the day, with a book, or family chat in the shade of a tree, with the bees droning among the flowers in the soaking sunshine, and few other sounds to disturb the peace and the security; the intermittent wanderings to look at this or that which had been looked at a score of times before, but was always worth looking at again--those garden hours impressed themselves upon the memory, sliding into one another, until the times of rain and storm were forgotten, and life seemed to be lived in the garden, in the yellow sunshine or the cool green shade.