The early evening was still and quiet. The Western sky, a faint copper-green with friths and locks of purple, was as yet unfired. In the long lights the landscape still retained its colour unaltered by the dying splendours of sunset. The engines of the car were running sweetly in a monotonous and drowsy hum, the driver sat motionless in front as they droned through the quiet villages and up and down the long white ribands of the road. It was an hour of unutterable content. Once they stopped in a village and drew up before the inn. It was a lovely place. A bell was tolling for evensong in the grey church and they saw the vicar pass under the lych-gate with slow footsteps. One of the long, painted windows was caught by the sun and gleamed like a red diamond. The road fell to a pond where green water-flags were growing and waxen-white water-lilies floated. Beyond it was a willow wood. The driver sat on a bench before the inn and drank his beer, but Gilbert and Rita passed through it into a garden that there was. The flowers were just beginning to cense the still air and the faint sound of a water-wheel down the river came to them--_tic, tac, lorelei!_ She would have milk, "Milk that one cannot get in London," and even he asked for no poison in this tranquil garden. Clematis hung the gables like tapestry of Tyrian purple. There were beds of red crocketed hollyhock and a hedge of honeysuckle with a hundred yellow trumpet mouths. At their feet were the flowers of belamour. "Men have died, trying to find this place which we have found," he said. A red-admiral floated by upon its fans of vermilion and black as Gilbert quoted, and a faint echo from the water-mill answered him. _Tic--tac--lorelei!_ "Magician! half an hour ago we were in London!" "You are happy?" "I can't find anything to say--yet. It is perfect." She leant back with a deep sigh and closed her eyes, and he was well content to say nothing, for in all the garden she seemed to him the most perfect thing, rosa-amorosa, the queen of all the roses! It was as a flower he looked at her, no more. It was all a dream, of course. It had come in dream-fashion, it would go in the fashion of a dream. At that moment she was not a warm human girl with a lovely face. She was not the clever, lonely, subtle-simple maiden in the house of books. She was a flower he had met. His mind began to weave words, the shuttle to glide in the loom of the poet, but words came to him that were not his own. "Come hither, Child! and rest; This is the end of day, Behold the weary West! "Now are the flowers confest Of slumber; sleep as they! Come hither, Child! and rest." And then he sighed, for he thought of the other poet who had written those lines and of what had brought him to his dreadful death. Why did thoughts like these come into the flower garden? How true--even here--were the words he had put upon the title-page of the book which had made him famous--