Yet it was not, he sometimes argued with himself, as if he had taken her from such a very different existence. She was a gardener’s daughter, as he was a gardener’s son, and had been born to the same tranquil round and lovely isolation. He had thought her happy enough when he saw her at home, cheerful and busy and making her own interests; but that, as he knew now, was merely because of her youth. The soul can lay out its own pleasure-grounds when it is young. Later, when it ceases to do so, it sees the little ring-fence surrounding it only too plainly. Right up to the time of her wedding, indeed, Mattie had been so busy, one way and another, that she had never realised her own requirements. Even if she had thought about them, she would have taken it for granted that marriage would mean a wider life, and instead she had found life narrow down upon her. Existence in her native place had been narrow, too, as she was ready to admit, but not _so_ narrow; for in the home of one’s youth there is always a way of escape through the magic door of childhood. It was tragic that she had not known that she needed a wider scope,--tragic for both of them. But she had not known, and there had been nobody--apparently--to tell her. It was the gardens which told her eventually,--his dear, charmed circle of the gardens,--when it was too late. He had found her, one evening,--as very soon after their marriage he had come to look for her,--sitting beside an upstairs window. The window was open, and by putting out her head she could see between the trunks of the trees to the coloured canvases of the fells. It was a circumscribed view at the best, with only a section of the hills visible when the weather permitted, together with a strip of sky laid nun-wise across their foreheads; but it was better than nothing. He had called up to her laughingly to ask her “what she was at,” and she had told him in reply that she was “shoving the walls away.” “Shoving what walls? And whatever for?” he had enquired, puzzled, and she had flung out her hands with a thrusting movement towards the walls surrounding the gardens. “_Them_ walls!” she had said vehemently. “They make me feel sort of choked. There’s times I feel I could hag ’em down with my own hands, brick by brick!” He had been so surprised by that that he had stayed under the window, staring, and wondering whether she wasn’t well, or whether something had happened to upset her. It seemed incredible to him that people should think of garden walls as shutting them in, when everybody knew that what they were really there for was to shut things and people out. “What, there was walls at home, wasn’t there?” he reminded her, at last. “Ay, and a deal higher than ours, too, now I come to think of it!” It had been her turn to stare, then, turning the problem over in her mind.