bowed over his hand, and his smile relaxed.

But in the cab George's arm stole round her underneath the cloak, and
they were borne on in the stream of hurrying hansoms, carrying couples
like themselves, cut off from all but each other's eyes, from all but
each other's touch; and with their eyes turned in the half-dark they
spoke together in low tones.

PART II

CHAPTER I

GREGORY REOPENS THE CAMPAIGN

At one end of the walled garden which Mr. Pendyce had formed in imitation
of that at dear old Strathbegally, was a virgin orchard of pear and
cherry trees. They blossomed early, and by the end of the third week in
April the last of the cherries had broken into flower. In the long grass,
underneath, a wealth of daffodils, jonquils, and narcissus, came up year
after year, and sunned their yellow stars in the light which dappled
through the blossom.

And here Mrs. Pendyce would come, tan gauntlets on her hands, and stand,
her face a little flushed with stooping, as though the sight of all that
bloom was restful. It was due to her that these old trees escaped year
after year the pruning and improvements which the genius of the Squire
would otherwise have applied. She had been brought up in an old
Totteridge tradition that fruit-trees should be left to themselves, while
her husband, possessed of a grasp of the subject not more than usually
behind the times, was all for newer methods. She had fought for those
trees. They were as yet the only things she had fought for in her
married life, and Horace Pendyce still remembered with a discomfort
robbed by time of poignancy how she had stood with her back to their
bedroom door and said, "If you cut those poor trees, Horace, I won't live
here!" He had at once expressed his determination to have them pruned;
but, having put off the action for a day or two, the trees still stood
unpruned thirty-three years later. He had even come to feel rather proud
of the fact that they continued to bear fruit, and would speak of them
thus: "Queer fancy of my wife's, never been cut. And yet, remarkable
thing, they do better than any of the others!"

This spring, when all was so forward, and the cuckoos already in full
song, when the scent of young larches in the New Plantation (planted the
year of George's birth) was in the air like the perfume of celestial
lemons, she came to the orchard more than usual, and her spirit felt the
stirring, the old, half-painful yearning for s