Chapter 36 - Page 2

park.

The Row at that hot hour being forsaken, instead of crossing the park to
seek her favourite resting-place, she turned into the fresh shade of the
elms growing near its northern unfashionable side. She walked on until
the fountains were passed and she was in the deeper shade of Kensington
Gardens. She was standing on the very spot where she had watched three
ragged little children playing together, heaping up the old dead brown
leaves. The image of the little girl struggling up from the heap in which
her rude playfellows had thrown her, with tearful dusty face, and dead
leaves clinging to her clothes and disordered hair, made Fan laugh, and
then in a moment she could scarcely keep back the tears. For now a
hundred sweet memories rushed into her heart--her walks in the Gardens,
all the little incidents, the early blissful days when she lived with
Mary; and so vividly was the past seen and realised, yet so immeasurably
far did it seem to her and so irrecoverably lost, that the sweetness was
overmastered by the pain, and the pain was like anguish. And yet with
that feeling in her heart, so strong that it made her cheeks pallid and
her steps languid, she went on to visit every spot associated in her mind
with some memory of that lost time. Under that very tree, one chill
October day, she had given charity unasked to a pale-faced man, shivering
in thin clothes; and there too she had comforted a poor wild-haired
little boy whose stronger companions had robbed him of all the chestnut-
burs and acorns he had gathered; and on this sacred spot a small angelic
child walking with its mamma had put up its arms and demanded a kiss.
Even the Albert Memorial was not overlooked, but she went not there to
admire the splendour of colour and gold, and the procession of marble men
of all ages and all lands, led by old Homer playing on his lyre. She
looked only on the colossal woman seated on her elephant, ever gazing
straight before her, shading her eyes from the hot Asiatic sun with her
hand, for that majestic face of marble, and the proud beautiful mouth
that reminded her of Mary, had also memories for her. And at last her
rambles brought her to the extreme end of the Gardens, to the once
secluded grove between Kensington Palace and Bayswater Hill; for even
that bitter spot among the yew and pine-trees must be visited now. She
found the very seat where she had rested on that unhappy day in early
spring, shortly after her adventure at Twickenham, when, as she then
imagined, her beloved friend and protector had so cruelly betrayed and
abandoned her. How desolate and heart-broken she had felt, seated there
alone on that morning in early spring, in that green dress which Mary had
given her--how she had sobbed there by herself,