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In April Sybil’s small garden came into flower, wallflowers and forget-me-nots and a few early tulips, and since she was growing big with child, she was obliged to content herself with looking at her flowers. She had a passion for being out of doors, and Keir bought her a two-and-sixpenny deck-chair for use in the garden. There was no room for the chair in the minute patch in front of No. 3, and when Sybil sat out at the back, she was at the mercy of her neighbours. Paragon Place had no privacy. Mrs. Block would appear and force her familiarities upon Sybil, and since Sybil had refused her the loan of domestic articles, Mrs. Block retaliated by compelling Sybil to lend her ears.

Mrs. Block described vividly and in detail her two childbirths and sundry miscarriages, and the “labours” of various friends. She referred to all the terrible things that might happen, and which she had known to happen. There was Gertie Parsons, who had lived at No. 7, and whose first pregnancy had been a horrible affair.

“They ’ad to put the instruments in her. She was torn to bits, she was, and the child was born dead. Its ’ead was all—”

Sybil fled into the house, and when Keir came home, he found her in tears. What was it? She confessed that the woman next door had been telling her things.

Keir was furious, and his fury translated itself into eighteen feet of deal fencing erected on the Block side in the form of a recess so that the lady should be excluded. He had managed to pick up some old posts and rails cheaply from a dump in the Samson & Hoad yard, for the fence—like their sojourn in No. 3—was not planned for permanence. This piece of fencing shut out Mrs. Block, but it was an added affront to the occupants of No. 4. The Block children hammered upon it; their mother said things over it.

Mrs. Jervis at No. 2 was less obvious than Mrs. B., and being upon her dignity, she had persuaded Mr. Jervis to erect a panel of trellis between No. 3 and No. 2. It was possible to look through the trellis, but Mrs. Jervis had become blind of eye towards No. 3. Her husband was to plant runner beans at the foot of this screen, and in the summer Mrs. Jervis would find herself almost as select as the Smiths.

Keir, appreciating Sybil’s loneliness and their isolation, was worried by it. He had to leave her so much alone, and Sybil was showing signs of becoming emotional and introspective. She had too much time to think about her ordeal, poor kid. He made a point now of coming back in the middle of the day to dinner, and one morning he met Mrs. Moore of No. 1 coming out of his gate.

She was a little, bright brown bird of a woman, sensible and kind, and she told Keir that she had been helping his wife.

“I just dropped in. She gets upset so easily about things.”

Keir thanked her. He was glad of those friendly brown eyes.

“I’d be glad for you to drop in any time, Mrs. Moore. I don’t like leaving the kid so much.”

Mrs. Moore had her own views upon Keir as a husband. He was rather too serious and strenuous a young man, but he would learn, and Mrs. Moore knew how much husbands had to learn, but if a chap was kind and kept off the drink, all things were possible. She could refer to her own husband as a man of few words, but one of the best.

“I’ll come in each day, Mr. Smith. I suppose you’ve arranged for the nurse.”

Keir had, but a nurse is not as valuable as a friendly neighbour when a baby comes into the world, and the home is disorganized.

“I’ll give her a hand when the baby comes. She’s a sweet thing, Mr. Smith, and I think you’re lucky.”

Keir agreed with her, and he was to become more and more glad of Mrs. Moore. She could be kind and practical without fussing; she had a soothing and a happy effect upon Sybil. Moreover, she was quietly but decisively anti-Block and not afraid of saying so. Like many small women she was a creature of great courage, and she had fought her battle with Mrs. B. and won it.

She said: “I’d be a socialist, Mr. Smith, if I thought the socialists could get rid of people like that, but I can’t say I see how they can. It’s in the blood. Look at their children. Block goes on being Block. That’s what I say.”

Meanwhile the back garden of No. 3 was asking to be cultivated, and since Sybil could not give herself to it, the challenge was Keir’s. She persuaded him to it, not foreseeing a certain incident that was to make that garden Eden after the Fall. She wanted Keir to grow potatoes and lettuces and peas and greens and to sow some annuals to make a summer show outside the kitchen window. If time was precious, she would be satisfied with dwarf nasturtiums, but she did ask for the faces of flowers.

Keir agreed. He began to give up his Saturday afternoons to the garden, in spite of the possible proximity of William Block and the Block small boys. He would go out with spade and hoe and rake as though the disreputable fence was five miles high or the next garden a rolling wilderness. Keir put in two rows of peas and six rows of early potatoes and pricked out a hundred or so lettuce seedlings presented to him by Mr. Moore. He had decided that Sybil should have her flowers, and he spent ten shillings on plants at Kingham market, French marigolds, snapdragons, asters, and ten-week stocks. The strip of ground fronting the kitchen window promised to be gay, but one night the Smith garden was raided and half the plants were torn up and thrown over into the Jervises’ garden next door.

Keir suspected the Block children. There were footmarks in the soil that had not been planted there by the boots of adults, but he could not prove his suspicions. The damage had been done after he and Sybil had gone to bed in the front bedroom.

But he mentioned the matter over the fence. He assumed that the Block children had been responsible for the outrage.

“I’ll trouble you to keep your kids out of my garden.”

The challenge was caught up and tossed back. Keir was accused of making unsubstantiated allegations against those innocents. He was told to mind his own business. He did mind it, while becoming increasingly aware of the active and jubilant hostility next door. Strange objects appeared in Sybil’s secret enclosure, discarded tins, and a paper parcel full of fishy remnants, an old bicycle tire. No. 4 was out for provocation.

The climax arrived one Saturday afternoon. Sybil did not witness the gathering of the storm. The boys invaded Keir’s garden, were chased, and the elder of the two received a box on the ear as he was scrambling over the ragged fence. He went in roaring to his parents, and the Block world erupted.

Sybil had just made tea and had gone to the kitchen window to call her husband. She stood there with a kind of stillness of shocked horror. She saw Keir prone among the young potatoes with that hulk of a man on top of him. Mr. Block was rubbing Keir’s face in the soil, while the two children hung over the fence and exulted.

Sybil’s impulse was to rush out and rescue Keir from that final humiliation, but something seemed to give way in her. Her eyes were dark and blind. She groped for a chair and sat down.

And suddenly she was aware of Keir in the doorway. His face was filthy. It had blood on it, and more than blood, a kind of soiled shame. His eyes avoided hers. He seemed to know that she had seen him squashed and vanquished by the strength of the silly brute next door.

She heard him hurry up the stairs. He was going to try and wash away that shame, but some shames are ineffaceable.

She wanted to rush up after him and take his soiled pride in her arms.

“Keir—oh, Keir, don’t look like that.”

But an elemental pang smote her. Her own crisis was at hand.