7/19 The charm of the place was clear and sane, its beauty simple almost to austerity. It washed her imagination free of the curious questionings, involuntary doubts and suspicions, which the house and garden at The Hard, steeped in tradition, thick with past happenings, past passions, were prone to breed in her. No reek off the mud-flats, any more than over luscious garden scents, tainted the atmosphere. It was virgin as the soil of the moorland--a soil as yet untamed and unfertilized by the labour of man. |