office at Jerusalem or some frontier town, or maybe a
dragoman attached to some Turkish caravansary would take charge of it,
and it might reach Nora by caravan. She might read it in the waste. Or
maybe it would have been better if he had written 'Not to be forwarded'
on the envelope. But the servant at Beechwood Hall would know what to
do, and he returned home smiling, unable to believe in himself or in
anything else, so extraordinary did it seem to him that he should be
writing to Nora Glynn, who was going in search of the Christian river,
while he was planning a journey westward.

A few days more, and the day of departure was almost at hand; but it
seemed a very long time coming. What he needed was a material
occupation, and he spent hours in his garden watering and weeding, and
at gaze in front of a bed of fiery-cross. Was its scarlet not finer than
Lady Hindlip? Lady Hindlip, like fiery-cross, is scentless, and not so
hardy. No white carnation compares with Shiela; but her calyx often
bursts, and he considered the claims of an old pink-flaked clove
carnation, striped like a French brocade. But it straggled a little in
growth, and he decided that for hardiness he must give the verdict to
Raby Castle. True that everyone grows Raby Castle, but no carnation is
so hardy or flowers so freely. As he stood admiring her great trusses of
bloom among the tea-roses, he remembered suddenly that it was his love
of flowers that had brought him to Garranard, and if he hadn't come to
this parish, he wouldn't have known her. And if he hadn't known her, he
wouldn't have been himself. And which self did he think the worthier,
his present or his dead self?

His brain would not cease thinking; his bodily life seemed to have
dissipated, and he seemed to himself to be no more than a mind, and,
glad to interest himself in the business of the parish, he listened with
greater attention than he had ever listened before to the complaints
that were brought to him--to the man who had failed to give up a piece
of land that he had promised to include in his daughter's fortune, and
to Patsy Murphy, who had come to tell him that his house had been broken
into while he was away in Tinnick. The old man had spent the winter in
Tinnick with some relations, for the house that the Colonel had given
him permission to build at the edge of the lake proved too cold for a
winter residence.

Patsy seemed to have grown older since the autumn; he seemed like a d