The long French windows were open, and the garden, all damp and sad-coloured, lay outside. Great chrysanthemums, potted out, were nodding under the marble-coloured sky, and they all seemed nodding at Geraldine. When a hitch came in the thread Geraldine's under lip would pout out. I felt now and then as if I were acting in a play, and the chrysanthemums' faces were the faces of the audience. Perhaps they were. Anyhow, I had learnt my part very badly, so it seemed to me. The tapestry was a great blessing; one could speak or not as one pleased, and I generally preferred--not. I fell to wondering does _she_ remember anything of that hunting morning so long ago: does she remember the poison, has she forgiven the poisoner, and has God? Then I began to talk to her again and she answered in a low measured voice that sounded to me like a bell from the far past, yet in spite of the ghostly kind of sadness with which her voice filled me, some of her answers made me laugh. She didn't know how to read; that came out in the course of our scrappy conversation. "But, _Geraldine_, why--you've never read your _Bible_, then?" One might have thought from my tone that I was a shocked Sunday-school superintendent, and it really did seem shocking to me that a person should never have read the Bible. "What is my Bible?" asked Geraldine, staring at me, half-frightened at my astonishment. "Oh, it's a book. I'll tell you about it some other time, but--but you can't know Geography. Do you know where Japan is, Geraldine, or India?" Geraldine's head shook. She looked dazed. "Do you know where England is?" Oh, yes, she knew where England was,--this house, this garden, all away beyond there, was England--all over there. How proudly she waved the white hand. It was patriotism pure and simple. She was proud of her park, not because it was her park, but because it was her native land. Her--his--I cannot say "his," I must always say "her;" besides, it doesn't matter now. It will never matter again, nothing will ever matter again. What gibberish I am writing; how those trees nod and nod their heads as if they were nodding at the little graveyard "away over there," just as the chrysanthemums were nodding that morning at Geraldine. She didn't know her Bible and she didn't know her Geography, and she didn't know "nothing." What a lot of ignorance was stowed away in that small head; but she knew something of natural history. The tapestry work had stopped, and we were walking in the little garden where the chrysanthemums were. I pointed to a snail on the path. "What is that, Geraldine?" "That," said Geraldine, "is a snail." How proud she seemed of her knowledge, and how tenderly she lifted the snail on to a leaf. The clock in the clock-turret was striking noon. "Can you read the clock, Geraldine?" "Oh, yes, and my watch." A watch the size of my thumb-nail was produced. How learned she was, really a kind of professor!