he nevertheless was not, nor was ever likely to be--and I
questioned whether, in his secret heart, he had not begun already to
feel particularly thankful for that circumstance.

"Ah, mother," cried the father, smiling, "you'll see how it will end:
all our young birds will soon be flown--there will be nobody left but
you and me."

"Never mind, John;" and stooping over him, she gave him one of her
quiet, soft kisses, precious now she was an old woman as they had been
in the days of her bloom. "Never mind. Once there were only our two
selves--now there will be only our two selves again. We shall be very
happy. We only need one another."

"Only one another, my darling."

This last word, and the manner of his saying it, I can hear if I listen
in silence, clear as if yet I heard its sound. This last sight--of
them sitting under the ash-tree, the sun making still whiter Ursula's
white shawl, brightening the marriage ring on her bare hand, and
throwing, instead of silver, some of their boyish gold colour into the
edges of John's curls--this picture I see with my shut eyes, vivid as
yesterday.

I sat for some time in my room--then John came to fetch me for our
customary walk along his favourite "terrace" on the Flat. He rarely
liked to miss it--he said the day hardly seemed complete or perfect
unless one had seen the sun set. Thus, almost every evening, we used
to spend an hour or more, pacing up and down, or sitting in that little
hollow under the brow of the Flat, where, as from the topmost seat of a
natural amphitheatre, one could see Rose Cottage and the old well-head
where the cattle drank; our own green garden-gate, the dark mass of the
beech-wood, and far away beyond that Nunneley Hill, where the sun went
down.

There, having walked somewhat less time than usual, for the evening was
warm and it had been a fatiguing day, John and I sat down together. We
talked a little, ramblingly--chiefly of Longfield--how I was to have my
old room again--and how a new nursery was to be planned for the
grandchildren.

"We can't get out of the way of children, I see clearly," he said,
laughing. "We shall have Longfield just as full as ever it was, all
summer time. But in winter we'll be quiet, and sit by the
chimney-corner, and plunge into my dusty desert of books--eh, Phineas?
You shall help me to make notes for those lectures I have intended
giving at Norton Bury, these ten years past. And we'll rub up our old
Latin,