The pink clusters of a pepper-tree dropped from behind a low garden wall right over him while he stood there. The air tingled with its faint savourous perfume, true essence of the South. And again that conviction of a previous existence, of something sweet, burning, poignant, caught him in the Adam’s apple veiled by his beard. Was it something he had dreamed? Was that the matter with him now--while the organ wailed, the girl’s song vibrated? Trevillian’s stare lighted on the prickly pears and aloes above the low, pink wall. The savagery of those plants jerked his mind forward almost to the pitch of--what? A youth passed, smoking a maize-coloured cigarette, leaving a perfume of Latakia, that tobacco of his own youth when he, too, smoked cigarettes made of its black, strong, fragrant threads. He gazed blankly at the half-obliterated name on the dilapidated garden gate, and spelled it aloud: “V lla Be u S te. Villa Beau Site! Beau----! By God! I’ve got it!” At the unbecoming vigour of his ejaculation a smile of release, wrinkling round his eyes, furrowed his thin brown cheeks. He went up to the gate. What a coincidence! The very----! He stood staring into a tangled garden through the fog of forty-five years, resting his large prayer-book with its big print on the top rail of the old green gate; then, looking up and down the road like a boy about to steal cherries, he lifted the latch and passed in. Nobody lived here now, he should say. The old pink villa, glimpsed some sixty yards away at the end of that little wilderness, was shuttered, and its paint seemed peeling off. Beau Site! That _was_ the name! And this the gate he had been wont to use into this lower garden, invisible from the house. And--yes--here was the little fountain, broken and discoloured now, with the same gargoyle face, and water still dripping from its mouth. And here--the old stone seat his cloak had so often covered. Grown over now, all of it; unpruned the lilacs, mimosas, palms, making that dry rustling when the breeze crept into them. He opened his prayer-book, laid it on the seat, and carefully sat down--he never sat on unprotected stone. He had passed into another world, screened from any eye by the overgrown shrubs and tangled foliage. And, slowly, while he sat there the frost of nearly half a century thawed. Yes! Little by little, avidly, yet as it were unwillingly, he remembered--sitting on his prayer-book, out of the sun, under the flowering tangled trees.