He passed slowly along in the spring sunshine, his feet crunching upon
the gravel, his straight shadow falling upon the white level between
coarse fringes of wire-grass. Far up the town, at the street's sudden
end, where it was lost in diverging roads, there was visible, as through
a film of bluish smoke, the verdigris-green foliage of King's College.
Nearer at hand the solemn cruciform of the old church was steeped in
shade, the high bell-tower dropping a veil of English ivy as it rose
against the sky. Through the rusty iron gate of the graveyard the marble
slabs glimmered beneath submerging grasses, long, pale, tremulous like
reeds.

The grass-grown walk beside the low brick wall of the churchyard led on
to the judge's own garden, a square enclosure, laid out in straight
vegetable rows, marked off by variegated borders of flowering
plants--heartsease, foxglove, and the red-lidded eyes of scarlet
poppies. Beyond the feathery green of the asparagus bed there was a bush
of flowering syringa, another at the beginning of the grass-trimmed
walk, and yet another brushing the large white pillars of the square
front porch--their slender sprays blown from sun to shade like
fluttering streamers of cream-coloured ribbons. On the other side there
were lilacs, stately and leafy and bare of bloom, save for a few
ashen-hued bunches lingering late amid the heavy foliage. At the foot of
the garden the wall was hidden in raspberry vines, weighty with ripening
fruit.

The judge closed the gate after him and ascended the steps. It was not
until he had crossed the wide hall and opened the door of his study that
he heard the patter of bare feet, and turned to find that the boy had
followed him.