of yew within them; but immediately behind the house, the wall to the
lane was not very high.




CHAPTER X.


ONCE MORE A SECRET.

One day in June I had gone into the garden about one o'clock, whether
with or without object I forget. I had just seen my uncle start for
Wittenage. Hearing a horse's hoofs in the lane that ran along the outside
of the wall, I looked up. The same moment the horse stopped, and the face
of his rider appeared over the wall, between two stems of yew, and two
great flowers of purple lilac, in shape like two perfect bunches of
swarming bees. It was the face of a youth of eighteen, and beautiful with
a right manly beauty.

The moment I looked on this face, I fell into a sort of trance--that is,
I entered for a moment some condition of existence beyond the ramparts of
what commonly we call life. Love at first sight it was that initiated the
strange experience. But understand me: real as what immediately followed
was to the consciousness, there was no actual fact in it.

I stood gazing. My eyes seemed drawn, and drawing my person toward the
vision. Isolate over the garden-wall was the face; the rest of the man
and all the horse were hidden behind it. Betwixt the yew stems and the
two great lilac flowers--how heart and brain are yet filled with the old