The garden where they had been sitting was one of peculiar charm, though to David it ranked rather high among the disadvantages of the place, for the lawn was not big enough to play any game into which hitting hard or kicking hard entered, and, as that was the paramount requirement demanded of pieces of grass, there was really very little to be said in favour of this garden. Balls always went into bushes or flower-beds; it was a very second-rate arena. The house itself, rambling and grey-stoned, lay between it and the road that circled round the close, and to north and south the garden on its longer sides was bounded by brick-walls which centuries of sun and wintry weather had mellowed to an inimitable softness of hue. Below the southern-facing wall a deep flower-bed, the grave of many balls, ran the whole length of the grass, which on the other side came up to the wall, flush as a carpet to a wainscotting. A few rose-beds sunned themselves below the low stone terrace that bordered the house, but the most distressing thing, from David’s standpoint, was that this kindly thick-leaved mulberry-tree, propped and strutted like a very old man taking the air, stood “bang” in the centre of the lawn, so that lawn-tennis was out of the question. Along the far end of the garden was a collection of sculptured stones (“Roman or something beastly,” was his verdict there) probably unearthed when the garden was first made. Here a gate in the middle of the third brick-wall led into the kitchen-garden, which, of course, from the orthodox athletic view of gardens, was also quite futile.