n hour ago."

"I beg your pardon," I say, humbly; "I will not disturb you; I would
have knocked if I had known!"

He has risen, and is coming toward me.

"Knock! why, in Heaven's name, _should_ you knock?" he says, with
something of his old glad animation; then, suddenly changing his tone to
one of courteous friendly coldness, "Why do you stand out there? will
not you come in?"

I comply with this invitation, and, entering, sit down in another
arm-chair not far from Roger's, but, now that I am here, I do not seem
to have much to say.

"You have been in the gardens?" he says, presently, glancing at my
little nosegay, and speaking more to hinder total silence from reigning,
than for any other reason.

"Yes," I reply, trying to be cheerful and chatty, "I have been picking
_these_; the Czar have not half their perfume, though they are three
times their size! _these_ smell so good!"

As I speak, I timidly half stretch out the little bunch to him, that he,
too, may inhale their odor, but the gesture is so uncertain and faint
that he does not perceive it--at least, he takes no notice of it, and I
am sure that if he had he would; but yet I am so discouraged by the
failure of my little overture that I have not resolution enough to tell
him that I had gathered them for him. Instead, I snubbedly and
discomfortedly put them in my own breast.

Presently I speak again.

"Do you remember," I say--"no, I dare say you do not, but yet it is
so--it is a year to-day since you found me sitting on the top of the
wall!--such a situation for a person of nineteen to be discovered in!"

At the recollection I laugh a little, and not bitterly, which is what I
do not often do now. I can only see his profile, but it seems to me that
a faint smile is dawning on his face, too.

"It was a good jump, was not it?" I go on, laughing again; "I still
wonder that I did not knock you down."

He is certainly smiling now; his face has almost its old, tender mirth.

"It will be a year to-morrow," continue I, emboldened by perceiving
this, and beginning to count on my fingers, "since Toothless Jack and
the curates came to dine, and you staid so long in the dining-room that
I fell asleep; the day after to-morrow, it will be a year since we
walked by the river-side, and saw the goslings flowering out on the
willows; the day after that it will be a year since--"

"Stop!" he cries, interrupting me, with a voice and face equally full of
disquiet and