'You may wait,' said Anna hastily, and as they re-covered themselves with hay with much subdued tittering and exhortations to caution, and calling out to Anna to be sure and say if a nose or foot were left visible, she climbed to the top of the wall and sat down. The sun was low--a few moments more and it would sink below the moor behind the house. The shadows lay long on the grass. The garden was to the right of the front door, whose flight of uneven steps led down upon flags bright with golden bosses of stone-crop. Old Lafer had a long frontage and a steep thatched roof with deep eaves where swallows loved to build. The two rows of windows were latticed with leaded panes; monthly roses reached to the sills of the lower ones. A thick growth of ivy round the door was climbing to the eaves at the end of the house farthest from the garden, heightening the rough effect of the lichened stone. Below it a little stream, clear and cold as crystal, issued from beneath the dairy and slipped down the flags in a runnel, murmuring softly as though eager to hide in the fern-fringed trough on the other side of the wall. The walls were all full of rue, and polypody, and crane's-bill--a growth of years--which no one was allowed to touch. There was nothing Mr. Severn valued more about the place than its bits of untutored nature. He had a horror of the pruning-knife, which Elias would have applied ruthlessly to lilacs and thorns, clipping them back to look tidy. These, edging the fir clump that sheltered Old Lafer from the north, were allowed to overhang the garden, their wild sprays of bloom following in fragrance close upon the wall-flowers that grew in a thick border under the windows of the best parlour. The garden had been made for the best parlour years ago when Old Lafer was the Hall and the Marlowes lived there. It was full of old-fashioned flowers and herbs, a garden for bees to go mad in. Mr. Severn had a row of hives under the sunniest wall, and before the ling was in blow the bees boomed to and fro all day on wings that should have been tipsy if they were not. When the ling was ablow the garden knew them no more. It was the end of July, and there was a flush on the moors which rolled abruptly to the sky-line behind the house. In front the meadows dipped into the valley of the Woss, then rose again to the village of East Lafer. After this, foliage and cultivation increased. The plain stretching away to the wolds was varied with fallow and stubble and pasture. Its tints were opalescent. Anna loved better the deep blue shadows that lurked in every hollow of the hills, showing their mouldings and intensifying their sunshine.