s though the sight of all that
bloom was restful. It was due to her that these old trees escaped year
after year the pruning and improvements which the genius of the
Squire would otherwise have applied. She had been brought up in an old
Totteridge tradition that fruit-trees should be left to themselves,
while her husband, possessed of a grasp of the subject not more than
usually behind the times, was all for newer methods. She had fought for
those trees. They were as yet the only things she had fought for in
her married life, and Horace Pendyce still remembered with a discomfort
robbed by time of poignancy how she had stood with her back to their
bedroom door and said, "If you cut those poor trees, Horace, I won't
live here!" He had at once expressed his determination to have them
pruned; but, having put off the action for a day or two, the trees still
stood unpruned thirty-three years later. He had even come to feel rather
proud of the fact that they continued to bear fruit, and would speak
of them thus: "Queer fancy of my wife's, never been cut. And yet,
remarkable thing, they do better than any of the others!"

This spring, when all was so forward, and the cuckoos already in full
song, when the scent of young larches in the New Plantation (planted
the year of George's birth) was in the air like the perfume of celestial
lemons, she came to the orchard more than usual, and her spirit felt the
stirring, the old, half-painful yearning for she knew not what, that
she had felt so often in her first years at Worsted Skeynes. And sitting
there on a green-painted seat under the largest of the cherry-trees, she
thought even more than her wont of George, as though her son's spirit,
vibrating in its first real passion, were calling to her for sympathy.

He had been down so little all that winter, twice for a couple of days'
shooting, once for a week-end, when she had thought him looking thinner
and rather worn. He had missed Christmas for the first time. With
infinite precaution she had asked him casually if he had seen Helen
Bellew, and he had answered, "Oh yes, I see her once in a way!"

Secretly all through the winter she consulted the Times newspaper for
mention of George's horse, and was disappointed not to find any. One
day, however, in February, discovering him absolutely at the head of
several lists of horses with figures after them, she wrote off at once
with a joyful heart. Of five lists in which the Ambler's name app