Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the cloister.djvu/16

 vast building; on the fourth rose a wall of masonry, so high and thick as to be an effective barrier between the quiet cloister and the great public thoroughfare on the other side of it. In the hollow square thus formed nestled the garden, as quaint in its old-time picturesqueness as if it had been lifted out of mediæval Spain and transplanted in another century to the soil of this new country.

Above the garden stretched the blue sky, now slowly fading into the gray of early evening. In the willows that lined the edges of the tiny lake, sleepy birds answered each other, their drowsy calls mingling with the rustle of the leaves and the cool splash of the fountain. The smooth garden paths that radiated from the lake were fringed with old-fashioned flowers: roses, honeysuckle, and mignonette, with here and there a bed of scarlet geranium that flaunted its aggressiveness brazenly in the rich sobriety of surrounding tones. At one end of the garden a chapel, roughly hewn from solid rock, was covered with a luxuriant growth of moss and vines; near it towered a rustic cross, its base a mass of passion flowers, its arms holding aloft the crucified Christ.

There were infinite sweetness and aloofness in the spot, so remote from all suggestion of the outside world. Within a stone's throw