For the truth must be owned.
No spinster over forty could look unmoved on Boulou.

Alas! for the Vicarage cook, who "had kept herself _to_ herself" for nearly fifty years, only to fall the victim of a "grande passion" for Boulou.
The little Lovelace bounded in, and the expedition started.

It was Regie's turn to choose where they should go, and he decided on the "shrubbery," a little wood through which ran the private path to Wilderleigh.

Doll Loftus had given the Gresleys leave to take the children there.
"Oh, Regie, we always go there," said Mary, plaintively, who invariably chose the Pratts' park, with its rustic bridges and _chalets_, which Mr.
Pratt, in a gracious moment, had "thrown open" to the Gresleys on Sundays, because, as he expressed it, "they must feel so cramped in their little garden." But Regie adhered to his determination, and to the "shrubberies" they went.

Hester was too tired to play with them, too tired even to tell them a story; so she sat under a tree while they circled in the coppice near at hand.
As we grow older we realize that in the new gardens where life leads us we never learn the shrubs and trees by heart as we did as children in our old Garden of Eden, round the little gabled house where we were born.