The cottage hospital had only recruited to the service of the sick in later life. For a hundred years or so it had been the haunt of the wicked landowner. Worldly squires’ wives had given tea in its paved pergola to curates’ wives in their best hats. But as the house grew older it reformed. Its walls, steeped in the purple village gossip of a century, now echoed only to the innocent if technical prattle of nurses. The only person who walked in its garden was Sister: she threw crumbs to the goldfish as severely as though the crumbs were for their good. For the blessing which the house inherited from its past was its garden. A small garden, like a cut emerald, but reflecting all other jewels. It was a garden that tried to enshrine sombre peace amid the vivid riot of spring. Its high clipped hedges drew decorously angular reflections in the pools. Brown wallflowers hid the feet of the hedges. The lilacs seemed somehow turned to half mourning by the proximity of a copper beech. A veil of tree seeds spinning down the wind fell diagonally across the garden. The pink horse chestnut was very symmetrical. Only the little saxifrages protested against the geometrical correctness of the paving-stones, and forget-me-nots sang a shrill song in blue from the restraining chaperonage of red pottery tubs. A little cupid with a dislocated hip played a noiseless flute from a pedestal. The garden was a prig, but it was the sort of prig that makes you wonder whether after all it is worth while to be so exquisitely sinful. They found Samuel Rust, who was the only patient in the hospital, the centre of a mist of nurses. He was lying in the shade of a great smooth yew pyramid with a military-looking bird fashioned on the top of it. Samuel Rust, that unusual young man, could never be much paler than he had been when in health, but he was grey now, rather than white, and his round sequins of eyes were set in a deeper setting. “The Tra-la-la young man,” he said as the gardener approached. “I have been wondering why I wanted to see you.” “So have I,” said Mrs. Rust, who, after a momentary lapse into a maternal expression, had turned her back on the invalid. “Let’s pretend I’m just an ordinary sick-bed visitor, then,” suggested the gardener. “One never knows why—or whether—one wants to see that sort of visitor. In that case I have to begin:—Dear Mr. Rust, I hope you are much better.” “Still posing,” said Samuel. “What is your latest attitude?” “I never pose,” said the gardener. “I have a horror of the pose. My mind’s eye sometimes changes the spectacles it wears, but that’s all. I now find that all along the gods were intending me to be a business man.” “Hard luck,” said Samuel. The nurses had melted away, and Mrs. Rust followed them into the house. The sun was making ready for his triumph in the west and a diffident moon perched on the peak of the pink horse chestnut.