"There
is such a wonderful sense of vanished life about it. The whole
garden seems dreaming about things of long ago--when troops of
ladies, now banished into pictures, wandered about the place, each
full of her own thoughts and fancies of life, each looking at
everything with ways of thinking as old-fashioned as her garments.
I could not be here after nightfall without feeling as if every
walk were answering to unseen feet, as if every tree might be hiding
some lovely form, returned to dream over old memories."
"Where is the good of fancying what is not true? I can't care for
what I know to be nonsense!"
She was glad to find a spot where she could put down the foot of
contradiction, for she came of a family known for what the
neighbours called common sense, and in the habit of casting contempt
upon everything characterized as superstition: she had now something
to say for herself!
"How do you know it is nonsense?" asked Donald, looking round in her
face with a bright smile.
"Not nonsense to keep imagining what nobody can see?"
"I can only imagine what I do not see."
"Nobody ever saw such creatures as you suppose in any garden! Then
why fancy the dead so uncomfortable, or so ill looked after, that
they come back to plague us!"
"Plainly they have never plagued you much!" rejoined Donal laughing.
"But how often have you gone up and down these walks at dead of
night?"
"Never once," answered Miss Graeme, not without a spark of
indignation.
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