onnected with her, but I
never worried about the details. So they used to come and sit here."

"Yes, he'd come to the gate at night and she'd meet him. Her people did
not want her to marry him and so they had to meet in secret."

"That was a long time ago."

"Before you were born," said Phyl.

He looked at her.

"Aunt is always saying how like you are to her," said he, "but she's mad
on family likenesses, and I never thought of it. It may be a want in me
but I've never taken much interest in dead relatives; but somehow, finding
this little place tucked away here gives one a jog. It's like finding a
nest in a tree. How long have you known of it?"

"Oh, some time. I found a bundle of her old letters--" she paused. Richard
Pinckney had taken his place on the little seat, just as one sits down in
an armchair to see if it is comfortable, and was leaning back amidst the
bush branches.

"This is all right," said he, "sit down, there's lots of room--you found
her letter, tell us all about it."

Phyl sat down and told the little story. It seemed to interest him.

"The Pinckneys lost money," said he, "and that's why the old Mascarene
birds were set against her marrying him, I suppose. Makes one wild that
sort of thing. What right have people to interfere?"

"Money seems everything in this world," said Phyl.

"It's not--it seems to be, but it's not. Money can't buy happiness after
one is grown up. You remember I told you that over in Ireland; when candy
and fishing rods mean happiness money is all right--after that money is
useful enough, but it's the making of it and not the spending it that
counts,--that and a lot of things that have nothing to do with money. If
the Mascarenes hadn't been fools they'd have seen that a poor man with
kick in him--and the Pinckneys always had that--was as good as a rich man,
and those two might have got married."

"No," said Phyl, "they never could have got married, he had to die. He was
killed, you know, at the beginning of the war."

"You're a fatalist."

"Well, things happen."

"Yes, but you can stop them happening very often."

"How?"

"Just by willing it."

"Yes," said Phyl meditatively, "but how are you to use your will against
what comes unexpectedly. Now that telegram yesterday morning took me to
Grangersons with Miss Pinckney. Suppose--suppose I had broken my leg or,
say, fallen into a well there and got drowned--that would have been
Fate."

"No," said Pinckney, "c