Such a moment he himself felt presently, as he leaned over a gate to rest, just before the road he traversed entered the outskirts of Ramsgard. Through the warm, misty evening, full of what seemed to him a veritable diffused essence of gold-dust, there came some quick wandering breaths of cooler air; and these breaths of air, brushing against his face and passing swiftly upon their way, carried a peculiar fragrance with them, a fragrance that made him think of a certain little garden of old-fashioned pinks that he used to pass, on his way to the place where he gave his lectures, down a narrow West London alley. If in Mr. Urquhart’s library he had been stirred by Roger Monk’s flowerbeds, he was more stirred now by this far-off impression. The pinks were meagre enough in themselves. But the thought of them in their sunbaked little garden, so close to the hot pavement, touched some chord of seminal memory that gave him just then a transporting thrill.