The golden gravel about the greenhouse had come at last to bear the barefoot prints of a small child, and Margaret Holloway, who for more years than the lindens along the estate wall could reckon had been the keeper of that glass garden and the quiet prisoner of its circumference, found the first of them on a night in early autumn as she made her slow evening circuit of the path that Mr. Edward Ashworth, magistrate and distant kinsman of her dead husband, had long ago declared the outermost limit of her sentence; she stopped with the greenhouse rising like a great gilt hull at her back, and she looked down at the print, which was no longer than the second joint of her thumb and lay pressed into the fine golden gravel with a weight no bare foot could have made without disturbing the stones around it, and she knew with a certainty born not of reason but of the long habit of her sorrow that it belonged to her son, Thomas, who had not come out of Holloway Cottage on the night of the fire, and that whatever mercy had sent such a mark into the gravel had sent it to her and to her alone.

Because the story of her sin was the architecture of her days. She had woken on the night of the fire to the smell of tallow burning and the low orange breathing beneath the door of the nursery, and she had run down the passage with Thomas in her arms, his weight terrible in the panic but nothing beside the weight of what she would carry afterward, and at the front door, where the iron latch had been painted shut by a winter's damp, she had set him down upon the rag rug to work the latch free with both hands, and in that single unhurried and forgivable moment Thomas had slipped past her and run back toward the burning room for the tin soldier he had left beneath the pillow of his bed, and she had gone after him, she would always maintain before the tribunal of her own nights that she had gone after him, but the hand that had dragged her out through the streaming doorway and across the frost-grained yard had been a stranger's hand, and the cottage had burned down to its foundation stones by morning, and the searchers had found in the ashes only the small buckle of a shoe and the twisted body of the soldier, and Thomas himself had never been found, which the coroner explained by the ferocity of the flames but which she had explained to herself, nightly, by the simple and sufficient truth that she had let go of his hand.

Mr. Ashworth had taken her in as he had taken in a dozen broken relatives of his ramshackle family, not out of love but out of the particular obligation a man of his station feels for the debris of his own blood, and because her grief had become a kind of violence, a thing that flung itself at the walls of any room that contained it, he had built for her the greenhouse, a great iron and glass cathedral in which golden roses were to be grown, and had given her the sentence of tending them, telling her that she might walk the gravel path at the boundary of the garden as often as she pleased but that the gate at the northern turn, where the juniper stood, would remain locked for her own protection; and because she believed herself irredeemable she had accepted that sentence without question, and the greenhouse had become her body, the golden path her pulse, the locked gate the fixed point of her destiny, and the years had passed over her the way weather passes over a field that has been left fallow so long it can be disturbed by nothing save fire.

The roses were Mr. Ashworth's strange bequest, for they bloomed the colour of late honey and carried in their closed petals a faint heat like the memory of a body that has just left a room, and she tended them with the only diligence her ruined life could muster, watering them from the deep well at the garden's heart, pruning them with the long iron shears that had hung from the same hook since the time of the old gardener who had raised the first stock, and gathering the fallen petals into the copper basket that was collected month by month by Eleanor Fairchild, the housekeeper of Ashworth Estate, who had carried Margaret's meals down the long turf walk for so many years that the two women had long ago exhausted the customary commerce of their voices and sat together now in a silence as worn and warm as a handled coin; Eleanor was a woman of such determined gentleness that Margaret had often thought she would have been incapable of cruelty even if cruelty had been required of her, and it was Eleanor who would sometimes speak, in the deep blue hour after supper, of the weather and the price of wool and the failing health of the master, who had grown so old that he no longer left the great house at all, having hung in the greenhouse an iron bell that Margaret was to ring if the roses were to bloom too heavily or if she had need of anything beyond the reach of her own hands, though she had never once lifted her hand to pull the rope, because to ring it would have been to acknowledge that she was still alive in the world and the world still obliged to answer her.

The barefoot print was followed by others. Over the weeks of that autumn the path received each night the passage of a child who was never visible when Margaret walked the circuit at dusk, and in the mornings the prints would be there in the golden gravel, sometimes a single line of them from the greenhouse door to the great dark juniper at the northern turn, sometimes a circular scuffle as though the child had stood and turned and considered, and once a double line, out and then back, as though a decision had been weighed upon the boundary and abandoned, and Margaret, whose nights had become as predictable as the iron rails of a bed, began to understand that these small arrivals were not the work of any living child but the returning of her son, and that Thomas had been walking the boundary of the world since the night of the fire, unable to leave her any more than she had been able to leave him, and that the path, which she had believed to be the wall of her sentence, was in truth the only road along which they could still travel toward each other; she began to walk the circuit faster, and the prints in the morning gravel began to increase, as though her speed were being answered by a speed on the other side of the visible, and the relation between her walking and the marks left overnight achieved the character of a correspondence, a letter written each evening in gravel and each morning in the absence of the sender.

It was on the last evening of October, when the light had grown so low and golden that it seemed to pour through the greenhouse panes in continuous sheets, that she saw the child directly for the first time, standing where the shadow of the juniper fell across the