through the echoing passages and strange dark rooms, undid with
trembling hands the bolts of the door to the verandah, and passed out
into a wonderful, unknown world. I stood for a few minutes motionless on
the steps, almost frightened by the awful purity of nature when all the
sin and ugliness is shut up and asleep, and there is nothing but the
beauty left. It was quite light, yet a bright moon hung in the cloudless
grey-blue sky; the flowers were all awake, saturating the air with
scent; and a nightingale sat on a hornbeam quite close to me, in loud
raptures at the coming of the sun. There in front of me was the sun-
dial, there were the rose bushes, there was the bunch of pansies I had
dropped the night before still lying on the path, but how strange and
unfamiliar it all looked, and how holy--as though God must be walking
there in the cool of the day. I went down the path leading to the stream
on the east side of the garden, brushing aside the rockets that were
bending across it drowsy with dew, the larkspurs on either side of me
rearing their spikes of heavenly blue against the steely blue of the
sky, and the huge poppies like splashes of blood amongst the greys and
blues and faint pearly whites of the innocent, new-born day. On the
garden side of the stream there is a long row of silver birches, and on
the other side a rye-field reaching across in powdery grey waves to the
part of the sky where a solemn glow was already burning. I sat down on
the twisted, half-fallen trunk of a birch and waited, my feet in the
long grass and my slippers soaking in dew. Through the trees I could see
the house with its closed shutters and drawn blinds, the people in it
all missing, as I have missed day after day, the beauty of life at that
hour. Just behind me the border of rockets and larkspurs came to an end,
and, turning my head to watch a stealthy cat, my face brushed against a
wet truss of blossom and got its first morning washing. It was
wonderfully quiet, and the nightingale on the hornbeam had everything to
itself as I sat motionless watching that glow in the east burning