Nor was it a garden.

Nothing grew in the dank air but crawling things which were horrible to the eye.

There were great rank growths of toadstools, yellow, blue, livid white, or spotted like adders, which squirmed and squelched underfoot to send up a sickly odour of decay.

The only green thing was some ivy, a parasitic vampire which drew its lifeblood from the mouldering corpse of an old church.
It was in this desolate place that the girl conceived her first impression of her father as a stern and silent man who burrowed among old graves like a mole.

Robert Turold had fought a stout battle for the secret contained in those forgotten graves on a bleak headland, but the sea had beaten him in the long run, carrying off the stones piecemeal until only one remained, a sturdy pillar of granite which marked the bones of one who, some hundred and fifty years before had been "An English Gentleman and a Christian"-- so much of the epitaph remained.