Now it is difficult not to think a little of my own life in telling of Hugh and Lamoir, for they helped me when I was very young, for a long time they were my only friends in London, and ever since they have remained the dearest. But it was only the other day that Hugh told me about the tree. I suppose he must have had a sort of idea of what might happen and wanted to tell someone about it while he could. But it’s odd that I had known him all those years, him and Lamoir, and he had never so much as mentioned the tree--when out he suddenly comes with it! Of course there will be those to say that he hadn’t concealed anything worth concealing, that it’s an impossible story anyhow, and who could believe it? But I do believe it decidedly, for how could Hugh have made it up? Hugh wasn’t an imaginative man, not a bit. That, in point of fact, is what the story is about. Of course, he had a passion for fine things, a passion for touching fine things, but your collector or your connoisseur isn’t generally anything of an imaginative man. Lamoir, now, she was quite different, and she might easily have thought of the garden and the tree and the whole business, but so far as I can make out Hugh and Lamoir never once breathed a word to each other about it. I have never been able to think of Lamoir quite steadily, I liked her too much. I know a writer is supposed to be impersonal, but that can’t be helped. She knew the very hearts of trees and flowers, Lamoir did, and she was always so still and quiet, like a flower herself, that you never knew what she was thinking of. And that is more or less how the trouble between them began, so Hugh told me the other day. He never knew what she was thinking of, but he hoped for the best, and then one day he found that she had been thinking away from him all the time. That is what Hugh said. But I feel that the truth of it was that he never thought Lamoir was thinking of anything at all, except maybe about what a good husband he was, and then one day he got a shock. Many men seem to be like that, they have happy natures, for when their wives are quiet and thoughtful they never dream that those thoughts might be out of accord with their own, and when they do at last realise that something has been wrong all the time they are surprised and hurt and want to know why they were not told sooner. As though, you know, some things can be told sooner, as though some things _can_ be told until it is too late!