n heart than I do. Take care! If you send me away--me and
my love--you may find that you have made a mistake!"

But she will not answer him--she will not even look at him. For all the
sign of life she gives she might be that Sleeping Beauty to whom he
first likened her.

"If ever you should feel sorry, Honor, for what you have said
to-day--if ever you should care to have me back, either as a friend or
lover, send for me, and I will come."

The words are calm enough, but by some instinct she divines that the
face bent close to hers is neither calm or cold. She hears him go away,
as he came, through the gap in the high hedge, but she does not even
open her eyes to watch him go. But, when all is still again, and she
knows that he has passed away out of her life, as surely as he has
passed out of the old-fashioned garden, she bursts into tears.

"Oh, what has come to me?" she says to herself again and again, in a
very maze of wonder at her own sensations. "I do not love the man. His
coming or his going matters nothing to me."

But, although she says this, not once but many times, the words bring
her no comfort. They do not still for one moment the inexplicable plain
that has risen in her heart. She gets up after awhile and goes back to
the house, choosing the small door at the side, so that she may meet no
one.

Aileen is ironing in the large front-kitchen, smoothing out, as she
calls it, one of Honor's pretty white dresses. It is a labor of love
with the old woman, and every week she comes up from her little cottage
to perform it.

At sight of her young mistress standing in the doorway, bright-eyed and
flushed, and strangely unlike herself, the good woman pauses.

"An' is it yourself, alanna? Shure my eyes have been aching for the
sight of your face this hour or more! But what ails ye, Miss Honor
darlint? Shure my black drames--bad 'cess to me for naming them till
ye--have not been troubling your mind?"

"No, no!" the girl says, laughing. "I am not troubled about anything,
only hot and thirsty, and--yes, Aileen, I may as well own it--cross."

She laughs again, but her voice is tremulous, and she keeps her face
well turned from the light.

"I wish it was only cross that I was, darlint!" the old woman says with
the peculiar solemnity of her class. "But it's sore and heavy-hearted I
am, and that's the blessed truth. I've done nothing but drame since
ever I saw you last, and every night it's the same thing over an