She pushed back the leaves and branches and bent them out of the way, then she took her seat, and as she did so several of the bent branches released themselves and closed half round her in a delightful embrace.

From here she could see brokenly the garden and the walk leading from the gate, with the light of the moon now strong upon the walk. The night sounds of the street just beyond the wall came mixed with the stir of foliage as the wind from the sea pressed over the trees like the hand of a mesmerist inducing sleep.

So it was here that Juliet Mascarene had sat with Rupert Pinckney on those summer nights when the world was younger, before the war. The war that had changed everything whilst leaving the roses untouched 155 and the moonlight the same on the bird-haunted garden of Vernons.

155

Everything was the same here in this little space of flowers and trees. But the lovers had vanished.

“For man walketh in a vain shadow and disquieteth himself in vain.” The words strayed across Phyl’s mind brought up by recollection. “He cometh up and is cut down like a flower, he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.”

The trees seemed whispering it, the eternal statement that leaves the eternal question unanswered.

The garden was talking to her, the night, the very bushes that clasped her in a half embrace; perfumes, moonlight, the voice of the wind, all were part of the spell that bound her, held her, whispered to her. It was as though the love letter of Juliet had led her here to show her as in a glass darkly the vainness of love in the vainness of life.

Vainly, for as she sat watching in imagination the forms of the lost lovers parting there at the gate, suddenly there came upon her a stirring of the soul, a joyous uplifting as though wings had been given to her mind for one wild second raising it to the heights beyond earthly knowledge.

“Love can never die.”

It was as though some ghostly voice had whispered this fact in her ear.

Juliet was not dead nor the man she loved, changed maybe but not dead. In some extraordinary way she knew it as surely as though she herself had once been Juliet.

Religion to Phyl had meant little, the Bible a book 156 of fair promises and appalling threats, vague promises but 

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