I will tell them at home."

She shook her head. "No," she said brokenly. "I'd rather we said nothing
now--if you don't mind."

She lifted up her face to him as a child might have done; and, putting
his arm round her, he bent down and kissed her, very simply and gravely.
Suddenly, he took her two hands and kissed their soft palms; and then he
stooped very low, and lifting the hem of her cotton frock kissed that
too.

"Rose?" he cried out suddenly. "Oh, Rose, I do love you so!" And then,
before she could speak he had turned and was gone.

CHAPTER XI

Rather more than an hour and a half later, Rose Otway, with bursting
heart, but with dry, gleaming eyes--for she had a nervous fear of her
mother's affectionate questioning, and she had already endured Anna's
well-meant, fussy, though still unspoken sympathy--stood at the
spare-room window of the Trellis House. From there she could watch,
undisturbed, the signs of departure now going busily on before the big
gates of the group of three Georgian houses known as "Robey's."

Piles of luggage, bags, suit-cases, golf sticks, and so on, were being
put outside and inside the mid-Victorian fly, which was still patronised
by the young gentlemen of "Robey's," in their goings and comings from
the station. And then, even before the old cab-horse had started his
ambling trot townwards, Mr. and Mrs. Robey, their two little girls, and
their three boys not long back from school, all appeared together at the
gate.

In their midst stood Jervis Blake, his tall figure towering above them
all.

Most young men would have felt, and perhaps a little resented the fact,
that the whole party looked slightly ridiculous. Not so this young man.
There had never been much of the schoolboy in Jervis Blake. Now he felt
very much a man, and he was grateful for the affectionate kindness which
made these good people anxious to give him what one of the little girls
had called "a grand send-off."

Rose saw that there was a moment of confusion, of hesitation at the
gate, and she divined that it was Jervis who suggested that they should
take the rather longer way round, that which led under the elm trees and
past the Cathedral. He did not wish to pass close by the Trellis House.

The girl standing by the window felt a sudden rush of understanding
tenderness. How strangely, how wonderfully their minds worked the one in
with the other! It would have been as intolerable to her as to him, to
have se