a steady content good to
see. And then, suddenly, Mrs. St. Quentin began to feel her age as she
had never, consciously, felt it before; and to be very willing to fold
her hands and recite her _Nunc Dimittis_. For, in looking on the faces
of the bride and bridegroom, she had looked once again on the face of
Love itself, and had stood within the court of the temple of that
Uranian Venus whose unsullied glory is secure here and hereafter, since
to her it is given to discover to her worshippers the innermost secret
of existence, thereby fencing them forever against the plagues of
change, delusion, and decay. Love began gently to loosen the cords of
life, and to draw Lucia St. Quentin home--home to that dear
dwelling-place which, as we fondly trust--since God Himself is Love--is
reserved for all true lovers beyond the grave and Gates of Death. Thus
one flower falls as another opens; and to-day, however sweet, is only
won across the corpse of yesterday.

And it was some perception of just this--the ceaseless push of event
following on event, the ceaseless push of the yet unborn struggling to
force the doors of life--which moved Katherine to seriousness, as she
stood alone on the smooth expanse of the troco-ground, in the soft,
all-covering twilight, at the close of the day's hospitality.

On her right the house, and its delicate twisted chimneys, showed dark
against the fading rose of the western sky. The air, rich with the
fragrance of the red-walled gardens behind her,--with the scent of
jasmine, heliotrope and clove carnations, ladies-lilies and
mignonette,--was stirred, now and again, by wandering winds, cool from
the spaces of the open moors. While, as the last roll of departing
wheels died out along the avenues, the voices of the woodland began to
reassert themselves. Wild-fowl called from the alder-fringed Long
Water. Night-hawks churred as they beat on noiseless wings above the
beds of bramble and bracken. A cock pheasant made a most admired stir
and keckling in seeing his wife and brood to roost on the branches of
one of King James's age-old Scotch firs.

And this sense of nature coming back to claim her own, to make known
her eternal supremacy, now that the fret of man's little pleasuring had
past, was very grateful to Katherine Calmady. Her soul cried out to be
free, for a time, to contemplate, to fully apprehend and measure its
own happiness. It needed to stand aside, so that the love given, and
all given with