"Of course, she has got to show me that she is offended with me," he reflected, gazing steadily at the Welsh hills. "She would not have come out if I had asked her, but she will certainly come as I did not. I will give her half an hour."

Rachel, meanwhile, was looking fixedly at Mr. Tristram from her bedroom window with that dispassionate scrutiny to avoid which the vainest would do well to take refuge in noisome caves.

"I wonder," she said to herself, "whether Hester always saw him as I see him now. I believe she did."

Rachel put on her hat and took up her gloves. "If this is really I, and that is really he, I had better go down and get it over," she said to herself.

Mr. Tristram had given her half an hour. She appeared in the low stone doorway before the first five minutes of the allotted time had elapsed, and he gave a genuine start of surprise as he heard her step on the gravel. His respect for her fell somewhat at this alacrity.

"I have been waiting in the hope of seeing you," he said, after a moment's hesitation. "I am anxious to have a serious conversation with you."

"Certainly," she said.

They walked along the terrace, and presently found themselves in the little coppice adjoining it. They sat down together on a wooden seat round an old cedar, in the heart of the golden afternoon.

It was an afternoon the secret of which Autumn and Spring will never tell to Winter and Summer, when the wildest dreams of love might come true, when even the dead might come down and put warm lips to ours, and we should feel no surprise.

A kingfisher flashed across the open on his way back to the brook near at hand, fleeing from the still splendor of the sun-fired woods, where he was but a courtier, to the little winding world of gray stones and water, where he was a jewelled king.

When the kingfisher had left them tête-à-tête, Mr. Tristram found himself extremely awkwardly placed on the green bench. He felt that he had not sufficiently considered beforehand the peculiar difficulties which, in the language of the law, "had been imported into his case."

Rachel sat beside him in silence. If it could be chronicled that sympathetic sorrow for her companion's predicament was the principal feeling in her mind, she would have been an angel.

Mr. Tristram halted long between two opinions. At last he said, brokenly:

"Can you forgive me?"

What woman, even with her white hair, even after a lifetime spent out of ear-shot, ever forgets the tone her lover's voice takes when he is in trouble? Rachel softened instantly.

"I forgave you long ago," she said, gently.

Something indefinable in the clear, full gaze that met his daunted him. He stared apprehensively at her. It seemed to him as if he were standing in cold and darkness looking in through the windows of her untroubled eyes at the warm, sunlit home which had once been his, when it had been exceeding well with him, but of which he had lost the key.