Vivie:  “My dear Michael:  I was forty-three last October.”

Michael:  “I was fifty-three last November, the day the Armistice was signed.  But I feel more like thirty-three.  Life in camp has quite rejuvenated me...”

Vivie (continuing):  ...  “And my hair is cinder grey—­an unfortunate transition colour.  And if the gardener were not looking I should say:  ’Feel my elbows ...  Dreadfully bony!  And my face has become...”  She turns her face towards him.  He sees tears trembling on the lower lashes of her grey eyes, but something has come into the features, some irradiation of love—­is it the light of the sunset?—­which imparts a tender youthfulness to the curvature of cheek, lips and chin.  Her face, indeed, might be of any age:  it held the undying beauty of a goddess, in whom knowledge has sweetened to tenderness and divinity has dissolved in a need for compassion; and the youthful assurance of a happy woman whose wish at last is won....

For a minute she looks at him without finishing her sentence.  Then she sits up straighter and says explicitly:  “Yes, I will.”

* * * * *

The gardener managed an occasional peep at them, sitting hand in hand.  He wished the idyll to last as long as the clear daylight, but the hour for closing was four o’clock—­“Il n’y avait pas a nier.”  Either they were husband and wife, reunited, after years of war-severance; or they were mature lovers, and probably of the most respectable.  In either case, the necessary hint that ecstasies must transfer themselves at sunset from the glass houses of the Jardin Botanique to the outer air was best conveyed on this occasion by a discreet gift of flowers.  Accordingly he went on to where exotic lilies were blooming, picked a few blossoms, returned, came with soft padding steps up to Vivie, offered them with a bow and “Mes felicitations sinceres, Madame.”  Vivie laughed and took the lilies; Rossiter of course gave him a ten-franc note.  And they sauntered slowly back to the hotel.

L’ENVOI

I am reproached by such Art Critics as deign to notice my pictures with “finishing my foregrounds over much,”—­filling them with superabundant detail, making the primroses more important than the snow-peaks.  And by my publishers with forgetting the price of paper and the cost of printing.  My jury of matrons thinks I don’t know where to leave off and that I might very well close this book on the answer that Mrs. Warren’s daughter gave to Sir Michael Rossiter’s proposal of marriage in the Palm House at Brussels.  “The reader,” they say, “can very well fill in the rest of the story for himself or herself.  It is hardly likely that Vivie will cry off at the last moment, or Michael reconsider the plunge into a second marriage.  Why therefore waste print and paper and our eyesight in describing the marriage ceremony, the inevitable visit to Honoria, and what Vivie did with the property she inherited from her mother?”