knowing my life was at an end.”
“But you were six years old. That is what is important. You do not perhaps realise the extent of the remaining of this free life of garden and woods with you.”
“I know it is there. I often dream I am there and wake there, and for a few minutes I could draw the house, the peaked shapes of it, and the porches and french windows and the way the lawns went off into the mysterious parts of the garden; and I feel then as if going away were still to come, an awful thing that had never happened. Of course after the years in the small house by the sea, I don’t remember the house, only the sea and the rocks, the house at Barnes grew in a way to be the same, but I never got over the suddenness of the end of the garden and always expected it to branch out into distances, every time I ran down it. I used to run up and down to make it more. …” He was no longer following with such an intentness of interest. There ought to have been more about those first years. Now, no one would ever know what they had been. …