“We’ll spend our honeymoon in a chalet in the Austrian Tyrol, Pat. I picked it out years ago. Then we’ll go home…home. Listen to me rolling the word under my tongue. I’ve never had a home, you know. Oh, how tired I am of living in other people’s houses! Pat, there is water in the house, of course, but I’ve made a little well out of the spring in the corner and stoned it up…a delightful little well where we can dip up water under the ferns. And we’ll put a saucer of milk there every night for the fairies. Judy’s white kittens are already hanging on the wall of our living room and that old china dog with the blue eyes you gave me years ago is squatting on the mantelpiece.”

“Hilary, you don’t mean to say you’ve got that yet?”

“Haven’t I! It has gone everywhere with me…it’s been my mascot. We’ll make it a family heirloom. And I have a few things picked up in my wanderings you’ll love, Pat.”

“Is there a good place for a garden?”

“The best. We’ll have a garden, my very own dear…with columbine for the fairies and poppies for dancing shadows and marigolds for laughter. And we’ll have the walks picked off with whitewashed stones. Slugs and spiders and blight and mildew will never infest it, I feel sure. You’ve always been a sort of half-cousin to the fairies and you ought to be able to keep such plagues away.”

Delightful nonsense! Was it she, Pat, who was laughing at it…she, who had been in such despair an hour ago? Miracles did happen. And it was so easy to laugh when Hilary was about. That new, far, unseen home would be as full of laughter as Silver Bush had been.

“And Rae will be somewhere near after two years,” thought Pat.

They sat in a trance of happiness, savoring “the unspent joy of all the unborn years” in the moonlight and waving shadows of the ancient graveyard where so many kind old hearts rested. They had been dust for many years but their love lived on. Judy had been right. Love did not…could not die.

The moon had risen. The sky was like a great silver bowl pouring down light over the world. A little wind raised and swayed the long hair-like grass growing around the slab on Judy’s grave, giving the curious suggestion of something prisoned under it trying to draw a long breath and float upward.

“I wish Judy could have known of this,” said Pat softly. “Dear old Judy…she always wanted it.”