“And did your Aunt Matilda ever find you out?” inquired Margeret, hot on the trail of the rest of the story.
“My uncle made me promise again never to tell her,” Master Simon continued with a chuckle, “but he might have known that a little boy, so full of one idea as I was of that play, must spill the news abroad somehow. It was the day after our return that I was playing on the grass before our cottage while my aunt sat knitting in the doorway. Suddenly she asked:
“‘Simon, what is it that you are muttering?’
“She spoke so quickly and sharply that I, lost in a maze of dreams that I scarce understood, had no better wit than to tell her the line that was running through my head.
“‘Singing masons,’ she snapped. ‘What means that? There are no such words in the Bible and you have no business to be reading aught else. Where heard you that, Simon?’
“I had my scattered wits collected now, and I pretended not to hear.
“‘I think it is time I fed the hens,’ I said with sudden dutifulness. ‘See, the sun is almost down.’
“‘Not until you answer me,’ she directed, but again I feigned not to hear and hurried across the grass. I heard her get up to follow and then I ran as fast as my short legs would permit.
“‘Simon,’ she called after me, and I trembled lest I be caught and made to confess. I doubt whether she had the least suspicion of my uncle’s iniquity, or whether it was more than her curiosity that had become so roused. But well I knew that once she asked a question she was bound to have an answer.
“Across the poultry yard I fled, despair in my heart, for I heard her footsteps coming close behind. I remember thinking that I could hide almost anywhere, being so little, but that the sun was so low that my great long shadow would betray me wherever I sought shelter. So I climbed the palings that bordered my uncle’s ground, crossed the lane and squeezed through the hedge into the great garden over the way. Far off I could still hear my aunt’s shrill, high voice calling ‘Simon, Simon.’
“I have told you much of that garden, little Margeret, but never, never can I tell you enough; of the spreading trees, the pleached walks that were cool long tunnels in the summer’s heat, and of the high, dark hedges, through whose arches I could glimpse such wealth of colour and sunshine that it seemed I must be peeping into Paradise. I had walked there with my father when I was a tiny boy, and could still remember his tales of how he used to play there with the Princess Elizabeth, and how it was in the little enclosed garden at the centre, still called the Queen’s Garden, that the news had come that the English throne was hers. We often went there together to see the clipped yew-trees that the English gardeners call ‘maids-of-honour’ and to watch the old, old peacock trail his shabby feathers across the grass. The yews, my father said, had been named by the Princess after her own maids-of-honour, and one in particular that would grow thin and straggling in spite of the gardener’s care was called, after an unfortunately ugly and sharp-tempered lady of her company, ‘Mistress Abigail Peckham.’ After my father’s death I used to play there still, although my aunt did not greatly approve. The gardeners—there were but few of them now, and all of them old, because the Queen came almost never to this estate of hers—were kind to me and taught me all I know of flowers and growing things.