Nothing broke in on the tranquil seclusion of the garden but the floating sunbeams and the songs of the mocking birds. The high formal privet hedge shut out the yellow sand-and- clay road and all that passed over it. It seemed to be a barrier for the impalpable as well as for the actual; within, the cross currents of troubled existence, the disturbing sense of illimitable space, space just then loud with calamity, had no being. The garden, a long rectangle against the wide white face of the house, was divided again into small rectangles and plots by paths and low square-cut hedges and borders. There were many flowers, flowers laid like bright old-fashioned ribbons or spread like shawls of lavender and rose and gold silks; the cool depth of the flagged porch was banked with them, blazing sheafs cut and placed in terra-cotta bowls, pots of growing flowers, clear blue and silver-white and crimson, so that the reflected light there was kaleidoscopic with splintering, swordlike colors. But the tone of the garden, the close, was predominantly green. Filtered through the green leaves, held by the hedges, low and high, the air assumed a transparent and leafy shade intensified by the dispersed amber sunlight. The mocking birds with their experimental liquid melodies were not now alone; for the brown thrushes had arrived and were singing; and others, gay, scarlet, in feather but songless, were flashing through the serenity so absolute that it might have been shut in glass.