? Will
the High-Mightiness take me now? Or have I got to beg and explain a
little more?"

"You're a very untruthful character," said "the High-Mightiness"
unsteadily. "It wasn't I who hid away, and turned last winter into
hell for a well-meaning parson. Will--I take you? Come."

Again eternal things brooded over the bright, quiet garden and the
larkspur spires swayed unnoticed and the bees droned casually about
them and dived into deep cups of the lilies, and peace and sunshine and
lovely things growing were everywhere. But the two did not notice.

After a time: "What about Halarkenden?" asked the man, holding a slim
hand tight as if he held to a life-preserver.

"That's the last question in the Catechism," said Hope Stuart. "And
the answer is the longest. One of your letters did it."

"One of my letters?"

"Just the other day. I went to Forest Gate, as soon as I came home
from France--to tell Robin that I was going to get well. I was in the
garden. With--I hate to tell you--but with--all your letters." The
man flushed. "And--and Robin came and--and I talked a little to him
about you, and then, to show him what you were like, I read him--some."

"You did?" McBirney looked troubled.

"Oh, I selected. I read about the boy, Theodore--'the Gift.'"

Then she went on to tell how, as she sat in a deep chair at the end of
a long pergola where small, juicy leaves of Dorothy Perkins rose-vines
and of crimson ramblers made a green May mist over the line of arches,
Halarkenden had come down under them to her.

"I believe I shall never be in a garden without expecting to see him
stalk down a path," she said. She told him how she had read to him
about the boy Theodore with his charm and his naughtiness and his
Scotch name. How there had been no word from Robert Halarkenden when
she finished, and how, suddenly, she had been aware of a quality in the
silence which startled her, and she had looked up sharply. How, as she
looked, the high-featured, lean, grave face was transformed with a
color which she had never seen there before, a painful, slow-coming
color; how the muscles about his mouth were twisting. How she had
cried out, frightened, and Robert Halarkenden, who had not fought with
the beasts for nothing, had controlled himself once again and, after a
moment, had spoken steadily. "It was the boy's name, lassie," he had
said. "He comes of folk whom I knew--back home." How at that, with
his big clipp