“I wonder, now, whether this is a redstreak.”

As their sons talked thus the two fathers approached, and gravely looked on at this scene of riotous and yet lovely desolation.  Nests with eggs in them adorned every little bush, vines having broken the trellis ran far along the ground.  John, remembering that the place must have painful thoughts connected with their dead brother for his father and uncle, continued to talk to Valentine, and did not address either of them:  and whatever they may have felt they did not say a word; but Valentine presently observed the bed of lilies, and he and John moved on together, the two fathers following.

They outwalked their fathers, and Valentine, stooping over the bed, gathered two or three of the lovely flowers.

“The poor old grandmother!” he observed.  “Miss Melcombe told me she loved to watch this bed of lilies, and said only a few days ago, that she could wish they might never be disturbed.”

He turned—­both the old men stood stock still behind him, looking down on the lily-bed.  Valentine repeated what Miss Melcombe had told him.  “So no doubt, papa, you’ll give orders that it shall not be touched, as you are going to have all the place put in order.”

“Yes, yes, certainly my boy—­certainly he will,” said Uncle Augustus, answering for his brother.

Valentine was not gifted with at all more feeling or sentiment than usually falls to the lot of a youth of his age, but a sort of compunction visited him at that moment to think how soon they all, alive and well, had invaded the poor old woman’s locked and guarded sanctuary!  He stooped to gather another lily, and offered the flowers to his father.  Old Daniel looked at the lilies, but his unready hand did not move forward to take them; in fact, it seemed that he slightly shrank back.  With an instantaneous flash of surprise Valentine felt rather than thought, “If you were dead, father, I would not decline to touch what you had loved.”  But in the meantime his uncle had put forth a hand and received them.  “And yet,” thought Valentine, “I know father must have felt that old lady’s death.  Why, when he was in the mourning-coach he actually cried.”  And so thinking, as he walked back to the garden-door with John Mortimer, he paused to let John pass first; and chancing to turn his head for one instant, he saw his uncle stoop and jerk those lilies under a clump of lilac bushes, where they were hidden.  Before either of the old men had noticed that he had turned, Valentine was walking with his cousin outside, but an uneasy sensation of surprise and suspicion haunted him.  He could not listen to John Mortimer’s talk, and when, the rest of the party had gone back to the house, he lingered behind, returned to the garden, and, stooping down for an instant, saw that it was as he had supposed; there, under the lilac bushes, were lying those gathered lilies.

So he went back to the house.  The two grandsons were to return home that afternoon; the two sons were going to remain for a few days, that the wishes of the deceased might have prompt attention, as regarded the setting of the place in order.  They were to sleep at the inn in the hamlet, by their own desire, that, as they said, they might not give trouble.