A Woman's War by Warwick Deeping

June is the month for the old world garden that holds mystery and fragrance within its red-brick walls. In Lombard Street you would suspect no wealth of flowers, and yet in the passing through of one of those solid, mellow, Georgian houses you might meet dreams from the bourn of a charmed sleep.

Aloofness is the note of such a garden. It is no piece of pompous mosaic-work spread before the front windows of a stock-broker's villa, a conventional color scheme to impress the public. The true garden has no studied ostentation. It is a charm apart, a quiet corner of life smelling of lavender, built for old books, and memories that have the mystery of hills touched by the dawn. You will find the monk's-hood growing in tall campaniles ringing a note of blue; columbines, fountains of gold and red; great tumbling rose-trees like the foam of the sea; stocks all a-bloom; pansies like antique enamel-work; clove-pinks breathing up incense to meet the wind-blown fragrance of elder-trees in flower. You may hear birds singing as though in the wild deeps of a haunted wood whose trees part the sunset into panels of living fire.