, "whether Hester always saw him as I see
him now. I believe she did."

Rachel put on her hat and took up her gloves. "If this is really I, and
that is really he, I had better go down and get it over," she said to
herself.

Mr. Tristram had given her half an hour. She appeared in the low stone
doorway before the first five minutes of the allotted time had elapsed,
and he gave a genuine start of surprise as he heard her step on the
gravel. His respect for her fell somewhat at this alacrity.

"I have been waiting in the hope of seeing you," he said, after a
moment's hesitation. "I am anxious to have a serious conversation with
you."

"Certainly," she said.

They walked along the terrace, and presently found themselves in the
little coppice adjoining it. They sat down together on a wooden seat
round an old cedar, in the heart of the golden afternoon.

It was an afternoon the secret of which Autumn and Spring will never
tell to Winter and Summer, when the wildest dreams of love might come
true, when even the dead might come down and put warm lips to ours, and
we should feel no surprise.

A kingfisher flashed across the open on his way back to the brook near
at hand, fleeing from the still splendor of the sun-fired woods, where
he was but a courtier, to the little winding world of gray stones and
water, where he was a jewelled king.

When the kingfisher had left them _tete-a-tete_, Mr. Tristram found
himself extremely awkwardly placed on the green bench. He felt that he
had not sufficiently considered beforehand the peculiar difficulties
which, in the language of the law, "had been imported into his case."

Rachel sat beside him in silence. If it could be chronicled that
sympathetic sorrow for her companion's predicament was the principal
feeling in her mind, she would have been an angel.

Mr. Tristram halted long between two opinions. At last he said,
brokenly:

"Can you forgive me?"

What woman, even with her white hair, even after a lifetime spent out of
ear-shot, ever forgets the tone her lover's voice takes when he is in
trouble? Rachel softened instantly.

"I forgave you long ago," she said, gently.

Something indefinable in the clear, full gaze that met his daunted him.
He stared apprehensively at her. It seemed to him as if he were standing
in cold and darkness looking in through the windows of her untroubled
eyes at the warm, sunlit home which had once been his, when it had been
exceeding well wit