n interfering old woman, and in days to come,
when you look to these distant hills, you will remember this day with a
kind thought for your beautiful mother's old friend."

"Isn't Lady Mary a darling?" said Diana, as we walked home through the
scented lanes on that most wonderful of summer evenings. "You look as if
you had been seeing visions, Betty, quite dazed like, as Nannie used to
say."

"I often see visions," I said.

"Have you been crying, Aunt Woggles?" said Hugh. "Were all the peaches
gone when you got back?"

Betty slipped her little hand into mine. "You promised to let me walk
with you for a little. Shall we pick honeysuckle, supposing we see any?"

"Yes, we will, darling."

"Supposing you can't reach it," she said.

"There is always some within reach."

"I suppose grown-ups can always reach things," said Betty.

Later, in the quiet darkness of the night, I could picture the garden,
the roses, the distant moor, Lady Mary's beautiful face, but I could not
bring myself to believe that I had really heard those words, "I am sure
that he cares."

Surely I had dreamed them, or Lady Mary had, because if they were true,
why had he said nothing? How should he have told her what he could not
tell me?

Chapter XVII

Then came that wonderful morning on which I read that Captain Paul
Buchanan was coming home, was expected to arrive that very day. I opened
the paper at breakfast, as usual and my eyes caught the word that at
any time had the power to set my heart thumping and to send the blood
rushing to my head, a word common enough, and which to most people,
beyond relating to a country always interesting, means little--Africa.
It is curious that a day that is to change the whole of one's life
should begin exactly like any other day. Of the most important things we
have no premonition, most of us.

That what I longed and prayed for every hour of my life should come to
pass was not wonderful, but that a day on which I was to be called to
make the greatest sacrifice of my life should steal stealthily upon me
seems strange.

That morning when I came downstairs, my little house in Chelsea looked
exactly like it always had done. The sun shone as the sun does shine
in the early winter in London, and no more, until after I had read that
paragraph; then, behold a new world was born. Why had my eyes been
blind to the gloriousness of the morning? Why had I thought the day an
ordinarily dull one with just