His face looked absent and singularly listless; but he seemed, none the
less, pleased to see me.
We walked up the village street, past the little dingy apothecary's and
the empty forge, and, as on my first visit, skirted the house together,
and, instead of entering by the front door, made our way down the green
path into the garden at the back. A pale haze of cloud muffled the sun;
the garden lay in a grey shimmer--its old trees, its snap-dragoned
faintly glittering walls. But there seemed now an air of neglect where
before all had been neat and methodical. There was a patch of
shallowly-dug soil and a worn-down spade leaning against a tree. There
was an old broken wheelbarrow. The goddess of neglect was there.
"You ain't much of a gardener, Seaton," I said, with a sigh of ease.
"I think, do you know, I like it best like this," said Seaton. "We
haven't any gardener now, of course. Can't afford it." He stood staring
at his little dark square of freshly-turned earth. "And it always seems
to me," he went on ruminatingly, "that, after all, we are nothing
better than interlopers on the earth, disfiguring and staining wherever
we go.
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