ve done, one on either side of Mrs. Fisher, and the sun, pouring
through the two windows facing east across the bay, flooded the room,
and there was an open door leading into the garden, and the garden was
full of many lovely things, especially freesias.

The delicate and delicious fragrance of the freesias came in
through the door and floated round Mrs. Wilkins's enraptured nostrils.
Freesias in London were quite beyond her. Occasionally she went into a
shop and asked what they cost, so as just to have an excuse for lifting
up a bunch and smelling them, well knowing that it was something awful
like a shilling for about three flowers. Here they were everywhere--
bursting out of every corner and carpeting the rose beds. Imagine it--
having freesias to pick in armsful if you wanted to, and with glorious
sunshine flooding the room, and in your summer frock, and its being
only the first of April!

"I suppose you realize, don't you, that we've got to heaven?" she said,
beaming at Mrs. Fisher with all the familiarity of a fellow-angel.

"They are considerably younger than I had supposed," thought Mrs.
Fisher, "and not nearly so plain." And she mused a moment, while she
took no notice of Mrs. Wilkins's exuberance, on their instant and
agitated refusal that day at Prince of Wales Terrace to have anything
to do with the giving or the taking of references.

Nothing could affect her, of course; nothing that anybody did.
She was far too solidly seated in respectability. At her back stood
massively in a tremendous row those three great names she had offered,
and they were not the only ones she could turn to for support and
countenance. Even if these young women--she had no grounds for
believing the one out in the garden to be really Lady Caroline Dester,
she had merely been told she was--even if these young women should all
turn out to be what Browning used to call--how well she remembered his
amusing and delightful way of putting things--Fly-by-Nights, what could
it possibly, or in any way matter to her? Let them fly by night if
they wished. One was not sixty-five for nothing. In any case there
would only be four weeks of it, at the end of which she would see no
more of them. And in the meanwhile there were plenty of places where
she could sit quietly away from them and remember. Also there was her
own sitting-room, a charming room, all honey-coloured furniture and
pictures, with windows to the sea towards Genoa, and