Good-night, sir." "Good-night, my boy." Vanamee was left alone.

For a long time he sat motionless in his place, his elbows on his knees, his chin propped in his hands.

The minutes passed--then the hours.

The moon climbed steadily higher among the stars.

Vanamee rolled and smoked cigarette after cigarette, the blue haze of smoke hanging motionless above his head, or drifting in slowly weaving filaments across the open spaces of the garden.
But the influence of the old enclosure, this corner of romance and mystery, this isolated garden of dreams, savouring of the past, with its legends, its graves, its crumbling sun dial, its fountain with its rime of moss, was not to be resisted.