But her parting was to be only for a few months.  Maulevrier promised to come back to Fellside for the August sports, and Hammond was to come with him.  Three months—­or a little more—­and they were to meet again.

Yet in spite of these arguments for courage, Mary’s face blanched and her eyes grew unutterably sad as she looked up at her lover.

‘You will take care of yourself, Jack, for my sake, won’t you, dear?’ she murmured.  ’If you should be ill while you are in London!  If you should die—­’

’Life is very uncertain, love, but I don’t feel like sickness or death just at present,’ answered Hammond cheerily.  ’Indeed, I feel that the present is full of sweetness, and the future full of hope.  Don’t suppose, dear, that I am not grieved at this good-bye; but before we are a year older I hope the time will have come when there will be no more farewells for you and me.  I shall be a very exacting husband, Molly.  I shall want to spend all the days and hours of my life with you; to have not a fancy or a pursuit in which you cannot share, or with which you cannot sympathise.  I hope you will not grow tired of me!’

‘Tired!’

Then came silence, and a long farewell kiss, and then the voice of Maulevrier shouting in the hall, just in time to warn the lovers, before Miss Mueller opened the door and exclaimed,

’Oh, Mr. Hammond, we have been looking for you everywhere.  The luggage is all in the carriage, and Maulevrier says there is only just time to get to Windermere!’

In another minute or so the carriage was driving down the hill; and Mary stood in the porch looking after the travellers.

’It seems as if it is my fate to stand here and see everybody drive away,’ she said to herself.

And then she looked round at the lovely gardens, bright with spring flowers, the trees glorious with their young, fresh foliage, and the vast panorama of hill and dale, and felt that it was a wicked thing to murmur in the midst of such a world.  And she remembered the great unhoped-for bliss that had come to her within the last four days, and the cloud upon her brow vanished, as she clasped her hands in child-like joyousness.

‘God bless you, dear old Helvellyn,’ she exclaimed, looking up at the sombre crest of the mountain.  ’Perhaps if it had not been for you he would have never proposed.’

But she was obliged to dismiss this idea instantly; for to suppose John Hammond’s avowal of his love an accident, the mere impulse of a weak moment, would be despair.  Had he not told her how she had grown nearer and nearer to his heart, day by day, and hour by hour, until she had become part of his life?  He had told her this—­he, in whom she believed as in the very spirit of truth.

She wandered about the gardens for an hour after the carriage had started for Windermere, revisiting every spot where she and her lover had walked together within the last three days, living over again the rapture of those hours, repeating to herself his words, recalling his looks, with the fatuity of a first girlish love.  And yet amidst the silliness inseparable from love’s young dream, there was a depth of true womanly feeling, thoughtful, unselfish, forecasting a future which was not to travel always along the primrose path of dalliance—­a future in which the roses were not always to be thornless.