I echoed most heartily that I was glad of it, and I left the room. But outside the door I stopped. There was a broad passage leading down to the hall door which stood wide open, and through a break in the trees, where stretched in the distance a sea of emerald, there stood the blood-brown sail of a Kerry fishing-boat. I stopped to watch it, flapping its wings in an idle breeze like a tortoise-shell butterfly in a green meadow. Then, as I suppose, thinking I had departed altogether, I heard Bellwattle's voice within the room.

"I like him very much," said she, for which silently I thanked her from the bottom of my heart. "But," she added, "what a pity he's so ugly."

Now, if there be those who do not follow from this how I knew that she had connected me at once in her mind with the mystery of some woman, I must leave it unexplained for the benefit of those who do. To give it words were to tangle it a thousand times. It is far too dainty for that.

I walked on then out into the garden, wandering up this path, down that. Everywhere there were those little sticks, neatly written on, marking the spots where seeds were in the earth. I picked up one and read it—"Sweet Pea—Lady Grizel Hamilton"—and all about that spot there was a cluster of little Lady Grizels, neat and clean in their tiny fresh green pinafores. Next door—for all the world like boys and girls at a country National school—stood a crowd of sturdy, young Lord Nelsons. Upon my soul I should not have known which was which had it not been for the kindly information of those little slips of wood directing me.

And then it suddenly occurred to me how strange it was, how dearly does all humanity cling to life; for whereas in God's Acre the little slips of wood mark out the places where the dead lie buried, it is not so with man. In that little acre which, with such simple vanity, he calls his own, his garden, a man will plant his tiny slips of wood to mark the spot where life is hidden for a while; hidden, only to come forth and blossom for his happiness. When, then, I had thought so far as that, there came with a rush into my mind the words in Maeterlinck's "Blue Bird," "There are no dead," and suddenly I saw it all.

The body of a man holds a seed. Through life it ripens, as all seeds do. Then, when the sun has parched it dry and you would say "there is no life in it"; then comes the hand of God to lay it in the earth once more that it may flower again.

In a strange, weird picture, then, I saw a vision of the Lady Grizel 

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