s sprouting between,
led to a low thatched cottage--oh, but a glorified cottage: a cottage
that looked as if it had died and gone to heaven! The flagged path had
tubs on either side. In them grew funny little Dutch treelets shaped
like birds and animals of different sorts; and the lawn kept all the
noble, gnarled giants that once had made it an orchard. The cottage was
yellow, like cottages in Devonshire, and the old thatch had the gray
satin sheen of chinchilla. A huge magnolia was trained over the front,
and climbing roses and wisteria, all in the sere and yellow leaf or bare
now; but I could picture the place in spring, when the diamond-paned bow
windows sparkled through a canopy of flowers, when the great apple trees
were like a pink-and-white sunrise of blossom, and underneath spread a
carpet of forget-me-nots and tulips.

How sweet must have been the air then, how blue the river background,
and how melodious the low song of a distant weir!

To-day, the air was faintly acrid with the scent of bonfire smoke--the
odour of autumn; and the sounds of wind and water over the weir were sad
as a song of homesickness.

I tapped an old-fashioned knocker upon a low green door. An elderly maid
appeared. I saw by the bleak glint of a pale eye that she meant to say,
"Not at home," and hastened to forestall her.

"See if Captain Lorillard is in, and if so tell him that Princess di
Miramare has come from town on purpose for a talk with him," I flung in
the stolid face.

There was no answer to that except obedience! The woman left me waiting
in a delightful little square hall furnished with a very few, very
beautiful, old things. And in a minute Robert Lorillard almost bounded
out of a room into which the maid had vanished.

It was the first time we had seen each other since the day he married
June Dana.

I had sat down on a cushioned chest in the hall. At sight of him I
jumped up, and meaning to hold out a hand, found myself holding out two!
He took both, pressed them, and without speaking we looked long at each
other. For both of us the past had come alive.

He was the same, yet not the same. Certainly not less handsome, but
changed, as all men who have been through the war are changed--anyhow,
imaginative men. Though he had been back from the Front for over a year
(he was invalided out after his last wound, just before the Armistice)
the tan wasn't off his face yet, perhaps never would be. There were a
few lines round