riend?" she said. "Do you not want me to
leave you to-day? If so, indeed I will not. What are you telling me with
those beautiful, sad eyes? That something is coming into my existence
that you promised me always, and that it will cause me sorrow, and I
must pause?"--and she shivered slightly and laid her cheek against the
marble cheek. "I am not afraid, and I want whatever it must be, since it
is life." Then she put the head back, and started upon her walk. But
first one thing and then another delayed her, until last of all she sat
down under the oak near the gap in the hedge and asked herself if all
these things could be chance. And here she took to dreaming and watching
the young rabbits come out of their holes, and to wondering what Fate
held in store for her in the immediate future. What was going to be her
life? That nothing but good could happen she always knew, because since
the very beginning God--the same personal kindly force that she had
always worshiped, unaltered by her deep learning, unweakened by any
theological dissertations--was there manifesting the whole year round
His wonderful love for the world.

And so she sat until the clock of the church at Sarthe-under-Crum struck
one, and she started up, realizing that she was too late now to go on to
Cheiron's and would only just have time to return for lunch with her
aunts. She must go instead in the afternoon. So she walked briskly to
the house, with a strange feeling of relief and joy, which she was quite
unable to account for in any explicable way.

Nothing delayed her on her second attempt to reach the orchard house,
and she found Cheiron placidly smoking while he read a volume of Lucian.
She was quite aware what that meant. When the Professor was in an amused
and cynical humor he always read Lucian, and although he knew every word
by heart, it still caused him complete satisfaction, plainly to be
discerned by the upward raising of the left penthouse brow.

Halcyone sat down and smiled sympathetically while she tried to detect
which volume it was, that she might have some clew to the cause of her
Professor's mood. But he carefully closed the book, so that she could
not see--it was the Judgment of Paris in the dialogue of the gods--and
she was unable to have her curiosity gratified.

"Something has entertained you, Cheiron?" she said.

"I have had the visit of two goddesses," he answered, chuckling. "Our
friend John Derringham brought them. He wanted