buy pants with texts on them for the Hottentots it’d be all the same to her. Something 153 to gad about with. I wish I’d kept that ten dollars in my pocket.”

153

Miss Pinckney went to bed early that night—before ten—and Phyl, who was free to do as she chose, sat for a while in the lower piazza watching the moon rising above the trees. She had a little plan in her mind, a plan that had only occurred to her just before the departure of Miss Pinckney for bed.

She sat now watching the garden growing ghostly bright, the sun dial becoming a moon dial, the carnations touched by that stillness and mystery which is held only in the light of the moon and the light of the dawn.

Phyl found herself sitting between two worlds. In the light of the northern moon in summer there is a vague rose tinge to be caught at times and in places when it falls full on house wall or the road on which one is walking. The piazza to-night had this living and warm touch. It seemed lit by a glorified ethereal day. A day that had never grown up and would never lose the charm of dawn.

Yet the garden to which she would now turn her eyes shewed nothing of this. Night reigned there from the cherokee roses moving in the wind to the carnations motionless, moon stricken, deathly white.

Sure that Miss Pinckney would not come down again, Phyl rose and crossed the garden towards the gate.

She wanted to see if the trysting place behind the magnolia and the bushes that grew about it were still there.

At the gate she paused for a moment, glancing 154 back at the house as Juliet Mascarene might have done on those evenings when she had an appointment with her lover. Then, pushing through the bushes and past the magnolia trees she found herself in a little half moonlit space, a natural arbour through whose roof of leaves the moonlight came in quavering shafts. She stood for a moment absolutely still whilst her eyes accustomed themselves to the light. Then she began to search for the seat she guessed to be there, and found it. It was between an oak bole and the wall of the garden, and the bushes behind had grown so that their branches half covered it. Neglected, forsaken, unknown, perhaps, to the people now living in Vernons it had lingered with the fidelity of inanimate things, protected by the foliage of the southern garden from prying eyes.

154

 Prev. P 90/185 next