Margot’s shop was in King street, near Mignot’s Garden, a little above the Bend. She lived in a little alley known as Lilac lane, a narrow, crooked, private path between two large estates, which rambled into the interspace like a brown brook into a wood. Beneath high green hedges it wandered into the solitude, growing narrower as it went, until the hedge boughs, meeting, knit themselves together, interlacing their elastic, leafy twigs. There the baffled foot-path seemed to lose its way and to abandon every purpose for which foot-paths are designed, ran on a little, hesitated, crept on again uncertainly, then gave up hope and disappeared in a green perplexity. The unfamiliar traveler paused here, bewildered, and turned back to find a bolder thoroughfare; familiar feet alone pressed on through Lilac lane. Where the strait way vanished into the wilderness stood Margot’s cottage, tucked snug as a plum stone in a plum. Around it was a garden hedged by box and bay. Of all the hedges in Lilac lane the highest were Margot’s. They rose around her garden in an impenetrable thicket, tall, dark-tangled, dense and old, their green tops tossing against the blue beyond the reach of the hedger’s bill. Within lay a little tranquil space, withdrawn alike from curious gaze and the town’s brawl, and overshadowed by the wide boughs of two great magnolias, whose drowsy shade fell heavily on the sleepy oleanders and over the rows of tulips below, that lifted up their golden cups and filled the air with odor. Here day and night flowed by in undisturbed serenity; all noise was hushed and tumult quelled; the shyest wild birds nested here in perfect confidence, fear cast away and foes forgot. No place in all the town seemed more secure from rude intrusion. No apparition came by night, no terror by day; so quiet it was, so full of peace, it seemed a sanctuary withdrawn from the interrupting clash and rude alarms of the troubled world,--its tranquillity that of a convent close, with little, distant, ringing bells, recurrent chimes and subdued voices, muffled by distance, as of nuns chanting an office in the peaceful choir of a green-nooked nunnery. * * * * * Margot Lagoux had a daughter; her name was Gabrielle.