its beauty because she lived
in it. Above all, to have found work to do, no easy matter when one
has torn oneself and one's past to shreds, as she had done. No doubt
she was making quite a nice little income by teaching; and, in
increasing admiration, he walked round the dusty inn and the
triangular piece of grass in front of it. A game of bat-and-trap was
in progress, and he conceived a love for that old English game,
though till now he thought it stupid and vulgar. The horse-pond
appealed to him as a picturesque piece of water, and, standing back
from it, he admired the rows of trees on the further bank--pollards
of some kind--and, still more, the reflections of these trees in the
dark green water; and his eyes followed the swallows, dipping and
gliding through the moveless air. A spire showed between the trees, a
girl and some children were gathering wild flowers in the hedgerows.
How like England! But here was Evelyn!

"Did you ever see a more beautiful evening? And aren't you glad that
the evening in which I see you again is--one would like to call it
beatific, only I don't like the word; it reminds me of the convent
you have left."

"One goes away in order that one may return home, Owen."

"Quite true; and all my travels were necessary for me to admire your
long, red road winding gracefully up the hillside between tall
hedges, full of roses, convolvulus, and ivy, under trees throwing a
pleasant shade." And coming suddenly upon an extraordinary fragrance,
he threw up his head, and, with dilated nostrils, cried out,
"Honeysuckle!"

"Yes, isn't it sweet?" she said. And, standing under a cottage porch,
he thought of the days gone by; and their memory was as overpowering
as the vine.

"I have brought you no present."

"Owen, you only returned yesterday."

"All the same, I should have brought you something. A bunch of wild
flowers I can give you, and I will begin my nosegay with a branch of
this honeysuckle. There are dog-roses in the hedges. I used to send
you expensive flowers, but times have changed." And he insisted on
returning to the brook, having seen, so he said, some forget-me-nots
among the sedges. And with these and some sprays of a little pink
flower, which he told her was the cuckoo-flower, they walked, telling
and asking each other the names of different wayside weeds till they
arrived at the cottage.

"There is my cottage."

And Owen saw, some twenty or thirty yards from the roadside, the
wh