humiliating to see Mother so distressed and uncertain. Olga did not usually obey, but kicked and screamed. Gilbert soon got the habit of ignoring his mother's expressed desires and wearing out her decisiveness. Then he would be left alone to follow his own desires.
That yard, which Aunt Nan loved so much, was for Gilbert a domain, a principality. It was years before he had really explored it thoroughly or searched out all its delights. At first it was a rich and bountiful collection of all the things that Gilbert had missed in the back-street. He did not know that he had missed them, but now that he had found them, something down very deep in him told that this was what his restlessness and sadness had craved.
You rushed out the side-door—for the front door was just as heavily interdicted as the front stairs—and you tumbled into a bed of myrtles and wistaria which climbed out of the flower-bed in thick stalks and grew steadily over the corner of the house. Across the path were two tall pine trees, whose branches brushed Gilbert's shutter by his bed when the wind blew loud. Beyond the trees lay the green, unbroken lawn, covered with velvety grass that even the lawn-mower could not keep from growing thick and soft like a carpet. The lawn went straight up towards the neighbor's fence, but just before it reached there it turned into a long flower-bed, with rose-bushes and tangled flowery vines that climbed over and pretended that there was no fence there at all. To the right, and up near the street corner of the yard were three more lordly pines set in a triangle, which Gilbert had promptly named "Three Trees Grove." The floor was covered with needles. It was shady and spacious, almost as big as Gilbert's room. It could be turned into a house, or a shop or a church, at a moment's notice. The big trunks stretching up above Gilbert's head gave it an air of delightful majesty, and he coould not play there enough with Olga and Cousin Ethel.
At the other end of the broad lawn were the grape-arbors, six or seven lines of them, where you walked between the overflowing vines and looked longingly at the green bunches which took endless æons, all through the long golden summer, to ripen, while Gilbert went every day to examine them. Behind that was the barn, from which the horses and carriage had vanished, though when Grandfather was alive, Garna told him, they had had their horses and Aunt Nan had ridden one of them, and so had Uncle Rob, who was far off in Texas now. Gilbert could see traces of the carriage road which had led
