He stood a minute before passing through the gates. The warmth of a windless night still slept in the velvety eyes of the roadside flowers. Morning was heaping off its bed-linen of glistening clouds. From a chestnut-tree came the drowsy drawl of a yellow-hammer. A robin--small fashionable idler of birds--abandoned the problem of a fibrous seed and, flickering to a stump, discussed the stranger impertinently and with infinite society relish. Only the swifts were alert and busy, flashing, poising, diving under the eaves; thridding Ned’s brain as they passed with a receding sound like that made by pebbles hopping over ice; seeming, in their flight of warp and woof, to be mending the pace set by the loitering day. Feeling their activity a rebuke, the visitor passed through the open gate. Within, all was yet more pretty orderliness than that he had once admired. The lodge stood, sequestered trimness, between the luminous green of its porch and the high rearward trees that spouted up into the sky, full fountains of tumbling young leaves. The little paths were swept; the little long beds, bordered with _trique-madame_ and planted with lusty perennials, were combed orderly as the hair of their mistress, and weeded to the least vulgar seedling; white curtains hung in the cottage windows; and everywhere was an added refinement of daintiness--a suggestion of increased prosperity. “Now, Mademoiselle Legrand,” thought Ned, “has shown herself a little person of resource.” He could hear the moan of the horn coming familiarly to him from the back garden. The sweet complaining cry woke some queer memories in him. He went forward a few paces up the drive--walking straight into weediness and the tangle of neglect--that he might get glimpse of the chateau. The place, when he saw it, glowered from an encroaching thicket. Even these few months seemed to have confirmed the ruin that had before only threatened. Its dusty upper windows were viscous, he could have thought, with the tracks of snails. Grass had made good its footing on the roof. It looked a forgotten old history of the past, with a toppling chimney, half dislodged in some gale, for dog’s-ear. Ned turned his back on the desolate sight, and lo! there was the bright patch of brick and flower like a garden redeemed from the desert. It appeared to point the very moral of the times, but in its ethical, not its savage significance. He went to seek the priestess of this little temple of peace. As he turned into the garden, a peasant woman was coming out at the lodge door. She had an empty basket lined with a clean napkin on her arm. “_Que la sainte virge vous bénissè par sa servante_!” she murmured as she passed by the visitor.