the garden!  She flung back her head, suddenly eager to see it; it was a friendly and thrilling sound in all that stillness.  Oh, it was coming lower—­lower still—­she could hear the throb of the propellers clearly.  Where was it?  Behind those trees, perhaps?  She raced up the flight of steps, dashing the treacherous tears from her eyes, straining up on impatient tiptoes.  Surely she could see it now!  But already it was growing fainter—­drifting steadily away, the distant hum growing lighter and lighter—­lighter still——­

“Janet!” called Mrs. Langdon’s pretty, patient voice.  “Dinner-time, dear!  Is there any one with you?”

“No one at all, Mrs. Langdon.  I was just listening to an airplane.”

“An airplane?  Oh, no, dear—­they never pass this way any more.  The last one was in October, I think——­”

The soft, plaintive voice trailed off in the direction of the dining-room and Janet followed it, a small, secure smile touching her lips.  The last one had not passed in October.  It had passed a few minutes before, over the lower garden.

She quite forgot it by the next week—­she was becoming an adept at forgetting.  That was all that was left for her to do!  Day after day and night after night she had raised the drawbridge between her heart and memory, leaving the lonely thoughts to shiver desolately on the other side of the moat.  She was weary to the bone of suffering, and they were enemies, for all their dear and friendly guise; they would tear her to pieces if she ever let them in.  No, no, she was done with them.  She would forget, as Jerry had forgotten.  She would destroy every link between herself and the past—­and pack the neat little steamer trunk neatly—­and bid these kind and gentle people good-by—­and take herself and her bitterness and her dullness back to the class-room in the Western university town—­back to the Romance languages.  The Romance languages!

She would finish it all that night, and leave as soon as possible.  There were some trinkets to destroy, and his letters from France to burn—­she would give Rosemary the rose-coloured dress—­foolish, lovely little Rosemary, whom he had loved, and who was lying now fast asleep in the next room curled up like a kitten in the middle of the great bed, her honey-coloured hair falling about her in a shining mist.  She swept back her own cloud of hair resolutely, frowning at the candle-lit reflection in the mirror.  Two desolate pools in the small, pale oval of her face stared back at her—­two pools with something drowned in their lonely depths.  Well, she would drown it deeper!