that love--even these matters of house and gardens, of
men-servants and maid-servants, of broad acres, all the poetry, in
short, of great possessions--might be seen in perspective. For
Katherine had that necessity--in part intellectual, in part practical,
and common to all who possess a gift for rule--to resist the confusing
importunity of detail, and to grasp intelligently the whole, which
alone gives to detail coherence and purpose. Her mind was not
one--perhaps unhappily--which is contented to merely play with bricks,
but demands the plan of the building into which those bricks should
grow. And she wanted, just now, to lay hold of the plan of the fair
building of her own life. And to this end the solitude, the evening
quiet, the restful unrest of the forest and its wild creatures should
surely have ministered? She moved forward and sat on the broad stone
balustrade which, topping the buttressed masonry that supports it above
the long downward grass slope of the park, encloses the troco-ground on
the south.

The landscape lay drowned in the mystery of the summer night. And
Katherine, looking out into it, tried to think clearly, tried to range
the many new experiences of the last months and to reckon with them.
But her brain refused to work obediently to her will. She felt
strangely hurried for all the surrounding quiet.

One train of thought, which she had been busy enough by day and
honestly sleepy enough at night, to keep at arm's length during this
time of home-coming and entertaining, now invaded and possessed her
mind--filling it at once with a new and overwhelming movement of
tenderness, yet for all her high courage with a certain fear. She cried
out for a little space of waiting, a little space in which to take
breath. She wanted to pause, here in the fulness of her content. But no
pause was granted her. She was so happy, she asked nothing more. But
something more was forced upon her. And so it happened that, in
realising the ceaseless push of event on event, the ceaseless dying of
dear to-day in the service of unborn to-morrow, her gentle seriousness
touched on regret.

How long she remained lost in such pensive reflections Lady Calmady
could not have said. Suddenly the terrace door slammed. A moment later
a man's footsteps echoed across the flags of the garden-hall.

"Katherine," Richard Calmady called, somewhat imperatively, "Katherine,
are you there?"

She turned and stood watching him as he came rapi