With some remark about the delightful day, the Candy Man, as a gentleman should, tried to pretend he was merely passing through, and though it was but a feeble performance, Miss Bentley should have accepted it without protest, then all would have been well.  Instead, she said, still with that puzzled half frown, “Don’t go, I am only waiting here a moment for my cousin, who has stopped at the superintendent’s cottage.”  She motioned over her shoulder to a vine-covered dwelling just visible through the trees.

“Please do not put it in that way,” he protested.  “As if your being here did not add tremendously to my desire to remain.  I am conscious of rushing in most unceremoniously upon you, and——­”

Hesitating there, hat in hand, his manners were disarmingly frank.  Miss Bentley laughed again as she deposited her flowers, a mass of pink and white cosmos, upon a bench, and sat down beside them.  She seemed willing to have him put it as he liked.  She wore the same grey suit and soft felt hat, jammed down any way on her bright hair and pinned with a pinkish quill, and was somehow, more emphatically than before, the Girl of All Others.

How could a Candy Man be expected to know what he was about?  What wonder that his next remark should be a hope that she had suffered no ill effects from the accident?

“None at all, thank you,” Miss Bentley replied, and the puzzled expression faded.  It was as if she inwardly exclaimed, “Now I know!” “Aunt Eleanor,” she added, “was needlessly alarmed.  I seem rather given to accidents of late.”  Thus saying she began to arrange her flowers.

The Candy Man dropped down on the step where the view—­of Miss Bentley—­was most charming, as she softly laid one bloom upon another in caressing fashion, her curling lashes now almost touching her cheek, now lifted as she looked away to the river, or bent her gaze upon the occupant of the step.

“Do you often come here?” she asked, adding when he replied that this was the third time, that she thought he had rather an air of proprietorship.

He laughed at this, and explained how he had set out to pay a visit to a sick boy at St. Mary’s Hospital, but had allowed the glorious day to tempt him to the park.

Below them on the terraced hillside a guard sat reading his paper; across the meadow a few golfers were to be seen against the horizon.  All about them the birds and squirrels were busily minding their own affairs; above them smiled the blue, blue sky, and the cousin, whoever he or she might be, considerately lingered.

Like the shining river their talk flowed on.  Beginning like it as a shallow stream, it broadened and deepened on its way, till presently fairy godmothers became its theme.

Miss Bentley was never able to recall what led up to it.  The Candy Man only remembered her face, as, holding a crimson bloom against her cheek, she smiled down upon him thoughtfully, and asked him to guess what she meant to do when some one left her a fortune.  “I have a strange presentiment that some one is going to,” she said.