“Quite true; and all my travels were necessary for me to admire your long, red road winding gracefully up the hillside between tall hedges, full of roses, convolvulus, and ivy, under trees throwing a pleasant shade.”  And coming suddenly upon an extraordinary fragrance, he threw up his head, and, with dilated nostrils, cried out, “Honeysuckle!”

“Yes, isn’t it sweet?” she said.  And, standing under a cottage porch, he thought of the days gone by; and their memory was as overpowering as the vine.

“I have brought you no present.”

“Owen, you only returned yesterday.”

“All the same, I should have brought you something.  A bunch of wild flowers I can give you, and I will begin my nosegay with a branch of this honeysuckle.  There are dog-roses in the hedges.  I used to send you expensive flowers, but times have changed.”  And he insisted on returning to the brook, having seen, so he said, some forget-me-nots among the sedges.  And with these and some sprays of a little pink flower, which he told her was the cuckoo-flower, they walked, telling and asking each other the names of different wayside weeds till they arrived at the cottage.

“There is my cottage.”

And Owen saw, some twenty or thirty yards from the roadside, the white gables of a cottage thrusting over against a space of blue sky.  Flights of swallows flew shrieking past, and the large elms on the right threw out branches so invitingly that Owen thought of long hours passed in the shade with books and music; but, despite these shady elms, the cottage wore a severe air—­a severe cottage it was, if a cottage can be severe.  Owen was glad Evelyn hadn’t forgotten a verandah.

“A verandah always suggests a Creole.  But there is no Creole in you.”

“You wouldn’t have thought my cottage severe if you hadn’t known that I had come from a convent, Owen.  You like it, all the same.”

Owen fell to praising the cottage which he didn’t like.

“On one thing I did insist—­that the hall was to be the principal room.  What do you think of it?  And tell me if you like the chimney-piece.  There are going to be seats in the windows.  Of course, I haven’t half finished furnishing.”  And she took him round the room, telling how lucky she had been picking up that old oak dresser with handles, everything complete for five pounds ten, and the oak settle standing in the window for seven.

“I can’t consider the furniture till I have put these flowers in water.”  So he fetched a vase and filled it, and when his nosegay had been sufficiently admired, he said “But, Evelyn, I must give you some flower-vases....  And you have no writing-table.”

“Not a very good one.  You see, I have had to buy so many things.”

“You must let me give you one.  The first time you come up to London we will go round the shops.”

“You’ll want to buy me an expensive piece, unsuitable to my cottage, won’t you, Owen?” She led him through the dining-room past the kitchen, into which they peeped.