She wrote verses in it and they were lovely; and
she wrote descriptions of the old garden which she loved very
much. Miss Reade said that everything in the garden, plot or
shrub or tree, recalled to her mind some phrase or verse of her
Aunt Una's, so that the whole place seemed full of her, and her
memory haunted the walks like a faint, sweet perfume.
"Una had, as I've told you, a lover; and they were to have been
married on her twentieth birthday. Her wedding dress was to have
been a gown of white brocade with purple violets in it. But a
little while before it she took ill with fever and died; and she
was buried on her birthday instead of being married. It was just
in the time of opening roses. Her lover has been faithful to her
ever since; he has never married, and every June, on her birthday,
he makes a pilgrimage to the old garden and sits for a long time
in silence on the bench where he used to woo her on crimson eves
and moonlight nights of long ago. Miss Reade says she always
loves to see him sitting there because it gives her such a deep
and lasting sense of the beauty and strength of love which can
thus outlive time and death. And sometimes, she says, it gives
her a little eerie feeling, too, as if her Aunt Una were really
sitting there beside him, keeping tryst, although she has been in
her grave for forty years.
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