Not a detail of the quaint garden escapes her. It is a garden of surprises. Fruit-trees from strange lands, dwarf shrubs of foreign birth, curious shells gathered on the beach of far-away islands, flourish promiscuously with indigenous plants. A painted lady (the figure-head of some effete sailing-craft), who has cloven the storms through many seas with her mighty breasts, and commanded the rising waves with her upraised hand, and faced the storm with a smile ghastly in its wooden fixity, has come here to rest. She leans next to an old sun-dial in the shade of an ancient lilac-bush. The sense of beauty, and the bump of utility of successive owners, is manifested at every turn. The even drills of potatoes are disturbed by the tombstone of a favorite dog; a plaster Mercury, and a shrub, cut in the form of a bulgy tea-pot, spoil the symmetry of a bed of carrots; strawberries carrying their ripe, red fruit right bravely fill the background of one bed, and a tangled profusion of pinks, pansies, and gilly-flowers, forget-me-nots, and fragrant lavender spikes have a long straight line of leeks running amid their sweet irregularity as a pungent line in a dainty sheaf of verse. She is conscious of a vague pleasure as she notes these things, and a sort of wondering pity at the pathos of her own quiet figure. She fingers her black cashmere gown and the heavy silk fringe of her shawl. She never wore a shawl before; they had nothing else black. Her mother used to wear a shawl, a white Indian silk with raised flowers. Her shoulders sloped too, like Eugenie's. Funny to wear a shawl like an old lady! She has a bag with money, papers, certificate of death for the customs. What a nuisance all these formalities are! "Lum tum, te tum, te tum,"--the dead march in Saul! no, she mustn't hum that. She remembers once in the long ago, before the flood, her flood, she had a sweetheart, a boy officer,--she wonders did he get fat; they always chaffed and said he would. Once she was humming it, when he stopped her saying, "Oh, don't! when any one hums that, a poor soldier dies somewhere." Superstition, of course; but she won't hum it, all the same, just for the old sake's sake. Why should she kill a soldier? She used to like all soldiers. "Tum tum!" Is she going mad? How does one go mad? She turns her head in relief at an approaching step. The little doctor stands bowing, hat in hand. She notices that he is wearing his dress-suit, and adds mentally, "They wear dress clothes on solemn occasions, christenings, weddings, funerals. Why, of course it's the funeral!" She even smiles at the conjunction of a swallow-tail with elastic side-leather boots with high heels. His trousers too must have been made before he grew stout; they ruck up at the knees, and show the end line of his under-drawers quite plainly. She feels inclined to laugh. She hasn't really laughed for a long time; well, why shouldn't she laugh? "Will Fruen come now?" he queries.