They stretched, some dozen or so of them, down the slope, divided up
thus for better protection against the wind. The close-set hedges of
elder were bare as skeletons, but so thickly entwined as, even so, to
form dense screens, only broken at the corners to allow of passing from
one little garden to the next and the next, both below and to one side.
In his childhood they had belonged to an old man who cultivated them
assiduously and sent in the produce to the weekly market at Penzance,
and then, in their patchwork brightness as narcissi and wall flowers,
violets, or beans and young potatoes, flourished there, they had
deserved their name of jewel-gardens, and to himself he had always
called them "the hanging gardens of Babylon"--a phrase that had filled
him with a sense of joy. Now they had been long neglected, and the bare
earth crumbled underfoot; even grass or weeds seemed afraid to grow
there. Dead, quiet, and still, they were become sinister little squares
of earth, shrouded by those contorted elders, dry and brown as they.

Blanche paused by a tall hedge and stood with her back against it, her
arms outflung on either side and her head up bravely. Ishmael had a
moment of looking round blindly as though he were in some trap from
which he could not escape, as though the walls of dead elder had grown
together and were penning him in. Then he faced her and spoke.

"Blanche!" he said; "won't you tell me what is the matter?"

Blanche said nothing; tears of pity suddenly choked her, and the
knowledge of the blow she was about to deal. Ishmael at last brought
himself to voice his dread.

"You aren't disappointed in it all--or in me?" he asked in a low voice.