g
courses of the family dinner which was to please the palates of those
fresh from Paris and London and from castles by the sea; and which was
to test to the utmost the measure of Susan's culinary skill.

At dinner the next night, Gordon Richardson looked often and intently
at Roger Poole, and when, under the warmth of the September moon, the
men drifted out into the garden to smoke, he said, "I've just placed
you."

Roger nodded. "I thought you'd remember. You were one of the younger
boys at St. Martin's--you haven't changed much, but I couldn't be sure."

Gordon hesitated. "I thought I heard from someone that you entered the
Church."

"I had a church in the South--for three years."

Gordon tried to keep the curiosity out of his voice.

"And you gave it up?"

"Yes. I gave it up."

That was all. Not a word of the explanation for which he knew Gordon
was waiting. Nothing but the bare statement, "I gave it up."

They talked a little of St. Martin's after that, of their boyish
experiences. But Roger was conscious that Gordon was weighing him, and
asking of himself, "Why did he give it up?"

The two men were sitting on the stone bench where Roger had so often
sat with Mary. The garden was showing the first signs of the season's
blight. Fading leaf and rustling vine had replaced the unspringing
greenness and the fragrant growth of the summer. There were, to be
sure, dahlias and chrysanthemums and cosmos. But the glory of the
garden was gone.

Then into the garden came Mary!

She was wrapped in a thin silken, scarlet cloak that belonged to
Constance. As she passed through the broad band of light made by the
street lamp. Roger had a sudden memory of the flame-like blossoming of
a certain slender shrub in the spring. It had been the first of the
flowers to bloom, and Mary had picked a branch for the vase on his
table in the Tower sitting-room.

"Constance wants you, Gordon," Mary said, as she came nearer; "some one
has called up to arrange about a dinner date, and she can't decide
without you."

She sat down on the stone bench, and Roger, who had risen at her
approach, stood under the hundred-leaved bush from which all the roses
were gone.

"Do you know," he said, without warning or preface, "that it seemed to
me that, as you came into the garden, it bloomed again."

Never before had he spoken thus. And he said it again. "When you
came, it was as if the garden bloomed."

He sat down besid