till for tea?'"

"That's beautiful," she said, "but it hurts."

"Thank God you'll never know how it hurts, little Golden Heart in quiet
gardens. But for some of us, caught like rats in the trap of the ugly
fever we called living, it was black torture and yet our dear delight
to remember the deep meadows we had lost--to wonder if there was honey
still for tea."

"Stephen, won't you tell me about it--won't that help?"

And suddenly some one else looked at her through those haunted eyes--a
little boy, terrified and forsaken. "Oh, I have no right to soil you
with it. But I came back to tell some one about it--I had to, I had to.
I had to wait until father and Audrey went away. I knew they'd hate to
see me--she was my stepmother, you know, and she always loathed me, and
he never cared. In East Africa I used to stay awake at night thinking
that I might die, and that no one in England would ever care--no one
would know how I had loved her. It was worse than dying to think that."

"But why couldn't you come back to Green Gardens--why couldn't you make
them see, Stephen?"

"Why, what was there to see? When they sent me down from Oxford for that
dirty little affair, I was only nineteen--and they told me I had
disgraced my name and Green Gardens and my country--and I went mad with
pride and shame, and swore I'd drag their precious name through the dirt
of every country in the world. And I did--and I did."

His head was buried in his arms, but Daphne heard. It seemed strange
indeed to her that she felt no shrinking and no terror; only great pity
for what he had lost, great grief for what he might have had. For a
minute she forgot that she was Daphne, the heedless and gay-hearted, and
that he was a broken and an evil man. For a minute he was a little lad,
and she was his lost mother.

"Don't mind, Stephen," she whispered to him, "don't mind. Now you have
come home--now it is all done with, that ugliness. Please, please don't
mind."

"No, no," said the stricken voice, "you don't know, you don't know,
thank God. But I swear I've paid--I swear, I swear I have. When the
others used to take their dirty drugs to make them forget, they would
dream of strange paradises, unknown heavens--but through the haze and
mist that they brought, I would remember--I would remember. The filth
and the squalor and vileness would fade and dissolve--and I would see
the sun-dial, with the yellow roses on it, warm in the sun, and smell
the clove pi