Conradin hated her with a desperate sincerity
which he was perfectly able to mask. Such few pleasures as
he could contrive for himself gained an added relish from
the likelihood that they would be displeasing to his
guardian, and from the realm of his imagination she was
locked out---an unclean thing, which should find no
entrance.
In the dull, cheerless garden, overlooked by so many
windows that were ready to open with a message not to do
this or that, or a reminder that medicines were due, he
found little attraction. The few fruit-trees that it
contained were set jealously apart from his plucking, as
though they were rare specimens of their kind blooming in an
arid waste; it would probably have been difficult to find a
market-gardener who would have offered ten shillings for
their entire yearly produce. In a forgotten corner,
however, almost hidden behind a dismal shrubbery, was a
disused tool-shed of respectable proportions, and within its
walls Conradin found a haven, something that took on the
varying aspects of a playroom and a cathedral. He had
peopled it with a legion of familiar phantoms, evoked partly
from fragments of history and partly from his own brain, but
it also boasted two inmates of flesh and blood.
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