The day coming in at the door was going to be a fine one, he saw, although he had known that, indeed, as soon as he opened his eyes. But it was a shrouded day as yet, with the mist still high above the river, and threaded in and out among the woods which surrounded the gardens. In any case, he could not have seen either the river or the Hall, for they were a hundred feet below, but even his usual glimpse of the fells across the valley, beautifully vignetted by the stems of larch and beech, was hidden from him by the mist. It was very quiet in his special domain on its steep little hill,--very quiet and very shut-in. There were the walls round it, first, the big, mellow, kitchen-garden walls, and then there were the mist and the trees, and then there was more mist again. The men had not yet come to work, and there was not even the sound of an approaching footstep. The sun had not yet broken through, bringing with it that sense of movement which is largely the play of light and shade. Only the birds were awake and beginning the day in their usual rushing way; and the river, which never slept at all, but ran and talked all night. It was quiet in the house, too, except for the lazy crackle of the idle fire, and the loud, determined strokes of the tactless clock. Mattie, he knew, must be still asleep, for if she had stirred he would have heard the bed creak in the room above. Even if she had not stirred he would have known if she was awake, for her vitality would have flowed down through the house and touched him as if with an actual hand. He loved the quietness. He loved being shut in on the top of his hill, and would have been only the better pleased if there had been thirty barriers about him instead of three. This was the time when the place was wholly his, before his staff stirred in the bothy or climbed the hill from the park. The men, when they came, had an air of possession even in their tread, and in the way they handled things and struck spades into the soil. It was natural, of course, but he felt that it robbed him a little. He had to share the gardens with them. His employers had the possessive air, too, although not so much as the men, both because they knew their place better and because they did not strike tools into the ground. But he had to share the gardens with them, all the same. They said: “What are you going to grow just here, Kirkby?” Or: “Don’t you think we might have so-and-so, this year, instead of this-and-that?” So they robbed him, too. Not that he was one of those jealous gardeners who grudge the stuff they grow even to the people for whom they grow it. He was not foolish about the gardens, or greedy in any way. He grew things for a purpose, and he liked them to fulfil that purpose. Only he _was_ the gardens, so to speak, after all these years, and when anything was taken from them it was part of him that was taken away.