to everything!" she exclaimed.

And she did it, and made the Canon poke his too.

Presently, opening the lattice of the second window in the big,
low-ceiled drawing-room, she leaned out to the moist and secluded
garden. She was sitting sideways on the window-seat, of which she had
just said, "I won't have this dreadful boudoir color on _my_ cushions!"
Canon Wilton was standing behind her, and presently heard her sigh
gently, and almost voluptuously, as if she prolonged the sigh and did
not want to let it go.

"Yes?" he said, with a half-humorous inflection of the voice.

Rosamund looked round gravely.

"Did you say something?"

"Only--yes?--in answer to your sigh."

"Did I? Yes, I must have. I was thinking----"

She hesitated, while he stood looking at her with his strong, steady
gray-blue eyes.

"I was thinking of a life I shall never live."

He came up to the window-seat.

"Some of it might have been passed in just such a garden as this within
sound of bells."

With a change of voice she added:

"How Robin will love it!"

"The life you will never live?" said the Canon, smiling gravely.

"No, the garden."

"Then you haven't a doubt?"

"Oh no. When I know a thing there's no room in me for hesitation. I
shall love being here with Robin as I have never loved anything yet."

The quarter struck in the Cathedral tower.

"Very different from South Africa!" said Canon Wilton.

Rosamund knitted her brows for a moment.

"I wonder whether Dion will come back altered," she said.

"D'you wish him to?"

She got up from the window-seat, put out her hand, and softly pulled the
lattice towards her.

"Not in most ways. He's so dear as he is. It would all depend on the
alteration."

She latched the window gently, and again looked at the garden through
it.

"I may be altered, too, by living here!" she said. "All alone with
Robin. I think I shall be."

Canon Wilton made no comment. He was thinking:

"And when the two, altered, come together again, if they ever do, what
then?"

He had noticed that Rosamund never seemed to think of Dion's death in
South Africa as a possibility. When she spoke of him she assumed his
return as a matter of course. Did she never think of death, then? Did
she, under the spell of her radiant and splendidly healthy youth, forget
all the tragic possibilities? He wondered, but he did not ask.

Mr. Robertson arrived at the Canon's house just in time for the
afternoon service--