Mrs. Barrow, at whose house it had been arranged that Edwin should put up for the night, was the Ingleby’s nearest neighbour and their landlady. The gardens of the two houses stood back to back with a high wall between, and the relations of the neighbours had always been so friendly that the little door in the wall was never locked, even though it was so seldom used that tendrils of ivy had attached themselves to the woodwork, forming a kind of natural hinge. On the Inglebys’ side of the wall lay a modern well-kept garden, not more than twenty years old. Edwin’s mother had a passion for flowers, and his father had made the gratification of her pleasure his favourite hobby, so that Edwin’s earliest memories of both of them were associated with the gathering of fruits and blooms, with the rich odours of summer, or, above all, the smell of newly-turned earth. This summer Mr. Ingleby had planted the long bed that stretched along the side of the house towards the door in Mrs. Barrow’s wall with masses of delicately-coloured stocks. Though the form of these flowers was not particularly beautiful their scent rose to meet him in a hot wave of overpowering sweetness. He remembered a letter in which his mother had told him how wonderful they were. Everything reminded him of her. . . . He passed through the door in the wall and entered another world. Everything connected with Mrs. Barrow was in character. She was a little old woman, the widow of a small manufacturer who had set his mark upon the countryside by the erection of a chimney stack taller than any other in the district, so tall that even from the summit of Pen Beacon it made a landmark more prominent than the slender spire of Halesby church. In Edwin’s eyes its presence was so familiar that he had almost become fond of it. Many and many times on windy days he had watched the immense structure swaying gently as a reed in a summer breeze. Under the shadow of Mr. Barrow’s monument lay an old garden designed on the formal lines of a hundred years ago, full of honeysuckle arbours and narrow twisted paths: so rich, and so tangled that every year a great part of its fruitfulness ran to waste. Long rows of lavender were there; and alleys of hoary apple-trees whose gnarled branches overreached the paths: and the whole place was so crowded with decaying vegetable matter and the mould of fallen leaves that even in high summer it had an autumnal savour and a ripe smell that was not unlike that of an apple loft.