"It will be very sweet to be allowed to confide in so kind a friend," said Allan. "My son will be home for his long leave before the end of the year, and I want you to make him your friend. He is very amiable," again with a suppressed sigh. "Come, now it is your turn to tell me something about yourself. This room tells you all there is to be told about me." "It tells me you are very fond of music." "I live for it. Music has been my companion and consoler all my life." "And I hope you will let me hear you play again some day." "Again? Ah, I forgot! You were in the churchyard last Sunday while I was playing. Did you listen?" "As long as you played. I was under the open window most of the time." "You are fond of organ music?" "As fond as an ignorant man may be. I know nothing of the subtleties of music. I have never been educated up to Wagner or Dvorak. I love the familiar voices--Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi, Gounod, Auber even, and I adore our English master of melody, Sullivan. Does that shock you?" "Not at all. I will play his cantata for you some day. If you have nothing better to do with your time this afternoon, I should like to show you my garden." "I shall be enchanted. I am enchanted already with that long straight walk, those walls of cypress and yew, that peacock sunning his emerald and sapphire plumage by the dial. In such a garden did Beatrice hide when Hero and her ladies talked of Benedick's passion; in such a garden did Jessica and Lorenzo loiter under the moonlight." "I see you love your Shakespeare." "As interpreted by Irving and Ellen Terry. The Lyceum was the school in which I learnt to love the bard. An Eton examination in Richard the Second only prejudiced me against him." "Mr. Wornock was a great Shakespearian." They were in the garden by this time--sauntering with slow footsteps along the level stretch of turf on one side of the broad gravel walk. At the end of the cypress avenue there was a semicircular recess, shut in by a raised bank, and a wall of clipped yew, in which, at regular intervals, there were statues in dark green niches. "Mr. Wornock brought the statues from Rome when he was a young man. The gardens were laid out by his grandfather nearly a century ago," explained Mrs. Wornock. Allan noticed that she spoke of her husband generally as "Mr. Wornock." "That amphitheatre reminds me a little of the Boboli gardens," said Allan; "but there is a peacefulness about this solitude which no public garden can have." Three peacocks were trailing their plumage on the long lawns between the house and the amphitheatre, and one less gorgeous but more ethereal, a bird of dazzling whiteness, was perched, with outspread tail, on an angle of the cypress wall. The lady and her companion strolled to the end of the lawn, and crossed the amphitheatre to a stone temple, open on the side fronting the south-western sun, and spacious enough to accommodate a dozen people.