CHAPTER XXXII DEAD LEAVES (1) In the Square garden, behind the statue of Butcher Cumberland, the leaves fell early that year. Anne-Hilarion, Comte de Flavigny, playing under their fading splendour, daily collected those he most esteemed, and bore them indoors to hoard in a rosewood box, lined with tartan, that had once been his mother's. Alas, like many other of this world's treasures, these precious things proved very evanescent. Either they fell to pieces, so brittle was their beauty, or else Mrs. Saunders, declaring that she would not have a rubbish heap in her nursery, threw them implacably away. Those were rather sorrowful days altogether in Cavendish Square. It had seemed at first, when August was beginning, that Anne's father had been snatched by a British naval officer's pertinacity from that shore of death in the Morbihan only to die in England. And the Chevalier de la Vireville, like so many others, had never come back at all. . . . Ere August was over M. de Flavigny, it is true, was out of danger; now, by mid-October, he was mending fast. But he was very sad; and of M. le Chevalier no one ever spoke to Anne-Hilarion, since a certain dreadful fit of crying, occasioned by his queries about his friend--or rather, by the answers which had to be given to those queries. And all the tragedy of Quiberon, its waste of life and loyalty and devotion, lay heavy over that London house, though no English existence or interests had suffered loss there. All the more, therefore, did it seem good to the powers governing Anne-Hilarion's days that he should frequent the Square garden this autumn more than in previous years. And this morning he was doing so, unattended, too, since John Simms, the gardener, was there sweeping up the leaves, and the child was under engagement not to go outside the enclosure. Elspeth had therefore left him for a space to his own devices, and Anne was supremely happy, transporting fallen leaves from one side of the garden to the other, in a little painted cart indissolubly united to a horse of primitive breed. The lack of playmates did not trouble him, and indeed his experience of these had not been uniformly happy. There had been the episode of Lord Henry Gower's two little boys, who also, as dwellers in that house overlooking the garden where the Princess Amelia had used to hold her court, sometimes took their pastimes therein. To them, on one occasion, 'French and English' had seemed a highly suitable game, and since Anne-Hilarion bore a Gallic name, it was quite clear what part he was to sustain. He sustained five distinct bruises also, and relations with the Masters Gower languished a little in consequence. "A'll lairn them play _Scots_ and English!" had threatened Elspeth, on discovering these evidences of realism; but the culprits never gave her the chance.