tter not come."

"I suppose grandmamma told you that."

"She did, most kindly and wisely."

A pause.

She was leaning in the still May sunshine against an old grey tomb of
carved stone. Two angels with spread wings upheld the defaced
inscription. Above it, over it, round it, like desire impotently defying
death, a flood of red roses clambered and clung. Were they trying to
wake some votary who slept below? A great twisted sentinel cypress kept
its own dark counsel. Against its shadow Fay's figure in her white
gossamer gown showed more ethereal and exquisite even than in memory.
She seemed at one with this wonderful, passionate southern spring, which
trembled between rapture and anguish. The red roses and the white irises
were everywhere. Even the unkept grass in which her light feet were set
was wild with white daisies.

"Do you remember our last walk on the down that day in spring?" she said
suddenly.

She had forgotten it until last night.

"I remember it."

"It was May then. It is May again now."

He did not answer. The roses left off calling to the dead, and suddenly
enfolded the two young grave creatures leaning against the tomb, in a
gust of hot perfume.

"Do you remember," Fay's voice was tremulous, "how you gave me a bit of
pink may?"

"I remember."

"I was looking at it yesterday. It is not very pink now."

It was true. In all shallow meanings, and when she had not had time to
get her mind into a tangle, Fay was perfectly truthful. She had
yesterday been turning over the contents of a little cedar box in which
she kept her childish possessions, and she had found in an envelope a
brown unsightly ghost of what had once been a may-blossom on a Hampshire
down. She had remembered the vivid sunshine, the wheeling seagull, the
soft south wind blowing in from the sea. Michael had kissed her under
the thin dappled shade of the flowering tree, and she had kissed him
back.

Michael's eyes turned for a long moment to the yellow weather-stained
arches of the cloister, and then he looked full at Fay with a certain
peculiar detached glance which had first made her endeavour to attract
him. There is a look in a man's face which women like Fay cannot endure,
because it means independence of them.

"I thought," he said, with the grave simplicity which apparently was
unchangeable in him whatever else might change, "that it was only I who
remembered. It has always been a comfort to me that any unhappiness
whi