And pouting, she stood twiddling the gardenia. Then suddenly
she thought: 'I'll put it in his buttonhole! When he wakes up and sees
it, how he'll jump!'

And stealing close, she bent and slipped it in. Two faces looked at her
from round the door; she heard Bob Pillin's smothered chuckle; her
mother's rich and feathery laugh. Oh! How red his forehead was! She
touched it with her lips; skipped back, twirled round, danced silently a
second, blew a kiss, and like quicksilver was gone.

And the whispering, the chuckling, and one little out-pealing laugh rose
in the hall.

But the old man slept. Nor until Meller came at his usual hour of
half-past twelve, was it known that he would never wake.

THE APPLE TREE

"The Apple-tree, the singing and the gold."
MURRAY'S "HIPPOLYTUS of EURIPIDES."

In their silver-wedding day Ashurst and his wife were motoring along the
outskirts of the moor, intending to crown the festival by stopping the
night at Torquay, where they had first met. This was the idea of Stella
Ashurst, whose character contained a streak of sentiment. If she had
long lost the blue-eyed, flower-like charm, the cool slim purity of face
and form, the apple-blossom colouring, which had so swiftly and so oddly
affected Ashurst twenty-six years ago, she was still at forty-three a
comely and faithful companion, whose cheeks were faintly mottled, and
whose grey-blue eyes had acquired a certain fullness.

It was she who had stopped the car where the common rose steeply to the
left, and a narrow strip of larch and beech, with here and there a pine,
stretched out towards the valley between the road and the first long high
hill of the full moor. She was looking for a place where they might
lunch, for Ashurst never looked for anything; and this, between the
golden furze and the feathery green larches smelling of lemons in the
last sun of April--this, with a view into the deep valley and up to the
long moor heights, seemed fitting to the decisive nature of one who
sketched in water-colours, and loved romantic spots. Grasping her paint
box, she got out.

"Won't this do, Frank?"

Ashurst, rather like a bearded Schiller, grey in the wings, tall,
long-legged, with large remote grey eyes which sometimes filled with
meaning and became almost beautiful, with nose a little to one side, and
bearded lips just open--Ashurst, forty-eight, and silent, grasped the
luncheon basket, and got o