She treated him with the easy informality of privileged intimacy.  She had accepted him as belonging, notwithstanding his damaging statements as to his antecedents, and he walked by the side of his divinity without a trace of awkwardness or nervousness.  This world of Truth was indeed a world of easy ways! . . .  The garden was fragrant with perfumes; the perfume of full-blown roses—­great pink and yellow and white blossoms, drooping in clusters from trees and bushes; of lavender from an ancient bed; of stocks—­pink and purple; of sweetbriar, growing in a hedge beyond.  They walked aimlessly about along the gravel paths and across the deep greensward, and Burton knew no world, nor thought of any, save the world of that garden.  But the girl, when they reached the boundary, leaned over the iron gate and her eyes were fixed northwards.  It was the old story—­she sighed for life and he for beauty.  The walls of her prison-house were beautiful things, but not even the lichen and the moss and the peaches which already hung amber and red behind the thick leaves could ever make her wholly forget that they were, in a sense, symbolical—­the walls of her life.

“To live here,” he murmured, “must be like living in Paradise!”

She sighed.  There was a little wistful droop about her lips; her eyes were still fixed northwards.

“I should like,” he said, “to tell you a fairy story.  It is about a wife and a little boy.”

“Whose wife?” she asked quickly.

“Mine,” he replied.

There was a brief silence.  A shadow had passed across her face.  She was very young and really very unsophisticated, and it may be that already the idea had presented itself, however faintly, that his might be the voice to call her into the promised land.  Certain it is that after that silence some glory seemed to have passed from the summer evening.

“It is a fairy story and yet it is true,” he went on, almost humbly.  “Somehow, no one will believe it.  Will you try?”

“I will try,” she promised.

Afterwards, he held the two beans in the palm of his hand and she turned them over curiously.

“Tell me again what your wife is like?” she asked.

He told her the pitiless truth and then there was a long silence.  As he stood before her, a little breath of wind passed over the garden.  He came back from the world of sordid places to the land of enchantment.  There was certainly some spell upon him.  He had found his way into a garden which lay beyond the world.  He was conscious all at once of a strange mixture of spicy perfumes, a faint sense of intoxication, of weird, delicate emotions which caught at the breath in his throat and sent the blood dancing through his veins, warmed to a new and wonderful music.  Her blue eyes were a little dimmed, the droop of her head a little sad.  Quite close to them was a thick bed of lavender.  He looked at the beans in his hand and his eyes sought the thickest part of the clustering mass of foliage and blossom.  She had lifted her eyes now and it seemed to him that she had divined his purpose—­approved of it, even.  Her slim, white-clad body swayed towards him.  She appeared to have abandoned finally the faint aloofness of her attitude.  He raised his hand.  Then she stopped him.  The moment, whatever its dangers may have been, had passed.