The Prisoner

								

runaway shrubbery looked, in a way of speaking, inpenetrable. It would
have taken so much trouble to get through that you would have felt
indiscreet in trying it. The driveway only seemed to have been brave
enough to pass it without getting choked up, a road that came in at the
big gateway, its posts marked by haughty granite balls, accomplished a
leisurely curve and went out at another similar gateway as proudly
decorated. The house held dignified seclusion there behind the
shrubbery, waiting, Lydia thought, to be found. You could not really
see it from the street: only above the first story and blurred, at that,
by rowan trees. But the two girls facing it there at near range and the
colonel with the charm of old affection playing upon him like airs of
paradise, thought the house beautiful. It was of mellow old brick with
white trimmings and a white door, and at the left, where the eastern sun
would beat, a white veranda. It came up into a kindly gambrel roof and
there were dormers. Lydia saw already how fascinating those chambers
must be. There was a trellis over the door and jessamine swinging from
it. The birds in the shrubbery were eloquent. A robin mourned on one
complaining note and Anne, wise also in the troubles of birds, looked
low for the reason and found, sitting with tail wickedly twitching at
the tip, a brindled cat. Being gentle in her ways and considering that
all things have rights, she approached him with crafty steps and a
murmured hypnotic, "kitty! kitty!" got her hands on him, and carried him
off down the drive, to drop him in the street and suggest, with a
warning pat and conciliating stroke, the desirability of home.
The colonel, following Lydia's excited interest, poked with his stick
for a minute or more at a bed under the front window, where something
lush seemed to be coming up, and Lydia, losing interest when she found
it was only pudding-bags, picked three sprays of flowering almond for
decorating purposes and drew him toward a gate at the east side of the
house where, down three rotting steps, lay level land. The end of it
next the road was an apple orchard coming into an amazingly early bloom,
a small secluded paradise. A high brick wall shut it from the road and
ran down for fifty feet or so between it and the adjoining place. There
a grey board fence took up the boundary and ran on, with a less
definite markedness to the eye, until it skirted a rise far down the
field and went on over the rise to lands unknown, at least to Lydia.
"Farvie, come!" she cried.
She pulled him down the crumbling steps to the soft sward and looked
about her with a little murmured note of happy expectation. She loved
the place at once, and gave up to the ecstasy of loving it "good and
hard," she would have said. These impulsive passions of her nature had
always made her greatest joys. They were like robust bewildering
playmates. She took them to her heart, and into her bed at night to help