Oh, those flowers! can I ever forget them? I have seen none so beautiful
since. There can be none so beautiful out of Paradise.

One spray of scarlet geranium was all that I ventured to pluck. But the
odours and the colours were there for all comers, and were as much mine
for the time being as if the flowers themselves had belonged to me.
Suddenly I turned and glanced up at the many-windowed house with a sort
of guilty consciousness that I might possibly be doing wrong. But the
house was still asleep--closed shutters or down-drawn blind at every
window. I saw before me a substantial-looking red-brick mansion, with a
high slanting roof, of not undignified appearance now that it was
mellowed by age, but with no pretensions to architectural beauty. The
sole attempt at outside ornamentation consisted of a few flutings of
white stone, reaching from the ground to the second floor, and
terminating in oval shields of the same material, on which had
originally been carved the initials of the builder and the date of
erection; but the summer's sun and the winter's rain of many a long year
had rubbed both letters and figures carefully out. Long afterwards I
knew that Deepley Walls had been built in the reign of the Third William
by a certain Squire Chillington of that date, "out of my own head," as
he himself put it in a quaint document still preserved among the family
archives; and rather a muddled head it must have been in matters
architectural.

After this, I ventured round by the main entrance, with its gravelled
carriage sweep, to the other side of the house, where I found a long
flagged terrace bordered with large evergreens in tubs placed at
frequent intervals. On to this terrace several French windows
opened--the windows, as I found later in the day, of Lady Chillington's