Passing behind the hollyhocks she threw the snails to Ned, not liking to tread upon them herself; Ellen was intent on freeing her flowers from gnawing insects and Ned tried to feel interested in them, but he liked the moonlight on the Dublin mountains far better. He could not remember which was Honesty and which was Rockit, and the difference had been pointed out to him many times. He liked Larkspur and Canterbury bells, or was it their names that he loved them for? He sometimes mistook one for the other just as Ellen mistook one sonata for another, but she always liked the same sonatas. "In another month the poppies will be over everything," she said, "and my pansies are beautiful--see these beautiful yellow pansies! But you are not looking at my garden." They went towards their apple-tree, and Ellen said it was the largest she had ever seen; its boughs were thickest over the seat, and shot out straight, making as it were a little roof. The moon was now brilliant among the boughs, and drawn by the moon they left their seat and passed out of the garden by the wicket, for that night they wished to see the fields with the woods sloping down to the long shores of the sea, and they stood watching, thinking they had never seen the sea so beautiful before. Now on the other side were the hills, and the moon led them up the hillside, up the little path by a ruined church and over a stream that was difficult to cross, for the stepping-stones were placed crookedly. Ellen took Ned's hand, and a little further on there were ash-trees and not a wind in all the boughs. "How grey the moonlight is on the mountain," Ned said, and they went through the furze where the cattle were lying, and the breath of the cattle was odorous in the night like the breath of the earth itself, and Ned said that the cattle were part of the earth; and then they sat on a Druid stone and wondered at the chance that brought them together, and they wondered how they could have lived if chance had not brought them together. Now, the stone they were sitting upon was a Druid stone, and it was from Ellen's lips that Ned heard how Brian had conquered the Danes, and how a century later a traitor had brought the English over; and she told the story of Ireland's betrayal with such ferveur that Ned felt she was the support his character required, the support he had been looking for all his life; her self-restraint and her gravity were the supports his character required, and these being thrown into the scale, life stood at equipoise. The women who had preceded Ellen were strange, fantastic women, counterparts of himself, but he had always aspired to a grave and well-mannered woman who was never ridiculous.