"You'd better dress now and go down in the garden and sit there,"
suggested Dick the next morning. "Take a book, and wait for me there.
The place will be empty in twenty minutes. I'll be along before lunch."

The garden rioted with color. The listless black figure strayed
through the sunshine down a walk between a mass of scarlet Oriental
poppies on one side and a border of swaying white lilies on the other.

Ranks of tall larkspur lifted blue spires beyond. The air was heavy
with sweet smells, mignonette and alyssum and the fragrance of a
thousand of roses, white and pink and red, over by the hedge. The
hedge ran on four sides of the garden, giving a comforting sense of
privacy. In spite of the suffering he had gone through, the raw nerves
of the man felt a healing pressure settling over them, resting on them,
out of the scented stillness. There were no voices from the house;
bees were humming somewhere near the rose-bushes; the first cricket of
summer sang his sudden, drowsy song and was as suddenly quiet.

The black figure strayed on, down the long walk between the flowers, to
a rustic summer-house, deep in vines, at the end of the path. There
were seats there, and a table. He sat down in the coolness and stared
out at the bright garden. He tried manfully to pull himself together;
he reminded himself that he could still work, could still serve the
world, and that, after all, was what he was in the world for. There
was a reason for living, then; there was hope, he reasoned. And then,
the hopelessness, the helplessness of under-vitality, which is often
the real name for despair, had caught him again. His arms were thrown
out on the rough table and his head lay on them.

There was a sound in the vine-darkened little summer-house. McBirney
lifted his head sharply; a girl stood there, a slim figure in black
clothes. McBirney sprang to his feet astonished, angry. Then the girl
put out her hand and held to the upright of the opening as if to hold
herself steady, and began talking in a hurried tone, as if she were
reciting.

"I had to come to tell you that you were not a coward, but a hero, and
that you saved Toddy Winthrop's life, and it's so, and Dick Marston
says you don't know it and won't let him tell you and I've got to have
you know it, and it's so and you have to believe it, for it's so." The
girl was gasping, clutching the side of the summer-house with her face
turned away, frightened yet det