ome attention," Daisy said to her daughter.
"Don't you think we might manage a French tea in the garden at four
o'clock? We have some rare old china and some solid silver and Dresden
linen, and we could get Lucy Jones to wait upon us. Do you think we can
do it?"

"Perhaps we can," Bessie replied, reflecting that a French tea in the
garden at four o'clock meant only thin slices of bread and butter, with
biscuits and possibly some little sponge cakes which would not cost
much. She could go without a pair of gloves and make the old ones do.
All extras came out of poor little Bessie, but she was accustomed to it,
and did not mind, and just now she was so glad to have her mother with
her, for Daisy, as if a little remorseful for what she was about to do,
was unusually sweet and affectionate and kind, and devoted herself to
her husband as she had never done since Bessie could remember. She
washed his face and hands and brushed his hair, and wheeled him out into
the garden under the old yew tree, where he once slept on the summer
morning while she kept the sun and the flies from him. And stooping over
him, she asked if he remembered the little girl who used to come to him
there when he was a boy.

"Yes; that was Daisy," he said, "but I have not seen her in many a year.
Where is she now?" and he looked at her in a strange, bewildered way.
Then, as the brain fog lifted a little and cleared away, his chin
quivered and he went on: "Oh, Daisy, Daisy; it comes back to me now, the
years that are gone, and you as you were then. I loved you so much."

"And don't you love me now, Archie?" she asked, kneeling beside him with
her white arms across his knees, while she looked into his face with the
old look she could assume so easily, and which moved even this weak man.

Laying his thin, pale hands upon her head, he burst into tears and said;

"Yes, Daisy, I have always loved you, though you have made no part of my
life these many years."

"And have you missed me? Have you been unhappy without me?" she asked,
and he replied:

"Missed you? Yes; but I have not been unhappy, for I have had Bessie. No
man could be unhappy with Bessie, I think I will go in now and find her.
I am better with her; and the birds are not singing here."

"What birds?" Daisy asked, looking curiously at him, as, with closed
eyes, he leaned wearily back in his chair and replied:

"The birds which sing to me so often; birds of the future, and the past,
too, I