And so Daisy rattled on with her small, tiresome talk, to which Bessie sometimes listened and sometimes did not.  The Rossiter-Brownes were in Leamington now, but were coming through Wales on their way to Liverpool, and Mrs. Browne and Augusta were to stop for a day or two at the “George” and take Daisy with them when they left.

“I wish we could show them some attention,” Daisy said to her daughter.  “Don’t you think we might manage a French tea in the garden at four o’clock?  We have some rare old china and some solid silver and Dresden linen, and we could get Lucy Jones to wait upon us.  Do you think we can do it?”

“Perhaps we can,” Bessie replied, reflecting that a French tea in the garden at four o’clock meant only thin slices of bread and butter, with biscuits and possibly some little sponge cakes which would not cost much.  She could go without a pair of gloves and make the old ones do.  All extras came out of poor little Bessie, but she was accustomed to it, and did not mind, and just now she was so glad to have her mother with her, for Daisy, as if a little remorseful for what she was about to do, was unusually sweet and affectionate and kind, and devoted herself to her husband as she had never done since Bessie could remember.  She washed his face and hands and brushed his hair, and wheeled him out into the garden under the old yew tree, where he once slept on the summer morning while she kept the sun and the flies from him.  And stooping over him, she asked if he remembered the little girl who used to come to him there when he was a boy.

“Yes; that was Daisy,” he said, “but I have not seen her in many a year.  Where is she now?” and he looked at her in a strange, bewildered way.  Then, as the brain fog lifted a little and cleared away, his chin quivered and he went on:  “Oh, Daisy, Daisy; it comes back to me now, the years that are gone, and you as you were then.  I loved you so much.”

“And don’t you love me now, Archie?” she asked, kneeling beside him with her white arms across his knees, while she looked into his face with the old look she could assume so easily, and which moved even this weak man.

Laying his thin, pale hands upon her head, he burst into tears and said;

“Yes, Daisy, I have always loved you, though you have made no part of my life these many years.”

“And have you missed me?  Have you been unhappy without me?” she asked, and he replied: 

“Missed you?  Yes; but I have not been unhappy, for I have had Bessie.  No man could be unhappy with Bessie, I think I will go in now and find her.  I am better with her; and the birds are not singing here.”

“What birds?” Daisy asked, looking curiously at him, as, with closed eyes, he leaned wearily back in his chair and replied: 

“The birds which sing to me so often; birds of the future, and the past, too, I think they are, for they sing sometimes of you, but oftener of Bessie and a journey far away where she is going to be happy when we are both gone and the winds are blowing across our graves—­over there,” and he pointed toward the little yard where his father and mother were lying side by side, and where he soon would lie.