had turned a sentence upon
this meeting.... He stepped forth from the little steamer late in the
afternoon in a brisk proprietory fashion, but the treasures of boyhood
were shining in his eyes; and he searched her face deeply, as if to
detect if mortal illness had begun its work amid the terrible
uncertainties of separation.

"Do you remember, at first, I was to find you down among the wharves
with _Moby Dick_?" she said.

"To-morrow morning--for that," he replied.

She showed him the way to his hotel, and the house where she was a
guest. But they supped together.

... They walked in Lily Lane in the dusk.

"It's too dark to see the Prince Gardens," she told him. "They're the
finest on the Island, and the house is the finest in Lily Lane....
There doesn't seem to be a light. I wonder if the old sisters are
gone?... The Princes were a great family here years and years ago, but
gradually they died out and dwindled away, until last summer there were
only two old maiden-aunts left--lovely, low-voiced old gentlewomen,
whom it was so hard to _pay_ for their flowers. But they lived from
their gardens and now _they're_ gone, it seems. I must ask to-morrow
what has become of them. And yet, the gardens are kept up. Can you see
the great house back in the shadows among the trees?"

Cairns believed he could make out something like the contour of a house
in denser shadow.

"The fragrance of the gardens is lovelier than ever," Vina went on,
"and listen to the great trees whispering back to the sea!"

They walked along the shore, and stared across toward Spain, and talked
long of Beth and Bedient.... And once Vina stretched out her arms
oversea, and said:

"Oh, I feel so strange and wonderful!"

Cairns started to speak, but forbore....

They met early in the morning, down upon the deserted water-front. An
hour of drifting brought them back to Lily Lane. There was a virginal
pallor in the sunlight, different from the ruddy summer of the
Mainland, as the honey of April is paler and sweeter than the heartier
essence of July flowerings. The wind breathed of a hundred years ago,
and the sublime patience of the women who hurried down Lily Lane (faded
but mystic eyes that lost themselves oversea through thousand-day
voyages), to welcome their knight-errants, bearing home the marrow of
leviathans....

"The gardens are kept up," Vina said, standing on the walk, before the
Prince house. "Perhaps the old sisters are still there