But a few weeks ago, the last time I was ever to dine with my friend, it instantly struck me that he was in quite a different mood. And presently he told me about the garden and the tree. He didn’t preface it with anything in particular, he was thoughtfully twisting the stem of his port-glass when he said: “Nearly nine years since I have seen Lamoir----” I said vaguely: “Yes....” Never once, you see, in all those nine years, had he so much as mentioned the name of Lamoir, and so I felt rather stunned at first. Hugh went on thoughtfully, not particularly to me: “And the first time I saw her I was nine years old. She must have been seven.” I said: “But I always understood that Lamoir passed her childhood in India and never came to England until she was twenty or so! I’d no idea you too were in India when you were little.” “I wasn’t,” he said, and he smiled, I think out of shyness just because he was talking about himself. “I wasn’t. That’s why, you see, it was so funny----” I was trying to imagine Lamoir seven years old. It was easy, of course, as it always is easy with people one likes. Her curly grey hair would be golden then, and maybe her grey eyes would be more blue than grey, and they would look enormous in a tiny face. And she would be walking, very still, making no noise at all, with two thin brown sticks for legs and two blue pools for eyes, very thoughtful indeed, and all this would be happening in a garden of red and yellow flowers with a long low white house nearby. That was how Hugh first saw Lamoir, in a garden, and nearby a long low white house with a broad flight of steps up to the open doorway and tall, shining windows. Dazzling white the house seemed to him, Hugh said, but that must have been because there was a very brilliant sun that afternoon. There was no noise, except just summer noises, and although he didn’t remember actually seeing any birds there must have been a lot of birds about, because he heard them. And simply masses of flowers there were in that garden, red and yellow flowers, and over a grey wall somewhere there was hung a thick curtain of flowers that may have been blue roses. And they may very well have been blue roses, Hugh said. And bang in the middle of all those flowers was Lamoir, staring at him as he came into the garden. Hugh was so surprised, he said, that he didn’t know what to say or do. He hadn’t, you see, intended coming into that garden at all. He hadn’t, a moment before, known anything at all about that garden or whose garden it was or even that there was a garden there at all. That is the funny part about the whole thing, the way it just sprung out at him, garden, Lamoir, blue roses and all, out of the summer afternoon. But there it was, and there Lamoir was, staring at Hugh. Not that she looked a bit surprised, Hugh said, although she was such a kid. She just stuck her finger into her mouth and came towards him.