The Garden
Page 33
Eithne lay back in her chair, and looked at the ceiling.
“I’ve never quite understood about him,” she said. “I don’t know—but I believe Mummy was in love with him once, or very nearly.”
Aunt Patricia sighed.
“Ah, sure,” she said. “We were all in love with Corny.”
She got up, and smiled sleepily down at them.
“I’m going up to me bed,” she observed. “Don’t stay on, now, too late, the two of you.”
They kissed her good night, and sat down again, to talk of things which many of their generation had to talk about: to look back to a childhood separated from their present by more than was good or wonted: to know themselves, like Grandpapa, relics of a past age, but an age fiercely, cruelly compressed: an age that budded, but never flowered.
And here we may leave them, and this story ; for, by its very nature, it can never be completed. Yet, if it does no more than suggest to some, whose imagination will not run far backwards, that even in those distant years the sun shone warm, and the days were good, it will have served its purpose.
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © L. A. G. Strong
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ISBN: 9781448205080
eISBN: 9781448204649
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