“I sha’n’t wait now.  I shall see you all at seven this evening.”

“Reply for us, Kate,” whispered Loftus.  “Reply for us all, quickly.”

“Yes—­we’ll come,” called Catherine across the water.

Beatrice smiled.  Her smile was of the sunniest.  It flashed back a look of almost love at Catherine.  Then she turned to walk up the steep steps which led from the quay to the little High Street.

“We ought not to go,” instantly began Catherine.

Loftus stopped rowing, bent forward and put his hand across her mouth.

“Not another word,” he said.  “I’ll undertake to conciliate the mother, and I think she can trust to my ideas of good-breeding.”

Meanwhile Beatrice walked quickly home.  The Meadowsweets lived at the far end of the town in a large gray stone house.  The house stood back a little from the road, and a great elm tree threw its protecting shade over the porch and upper windows.  It was, however, an ordinary house in a street, and looked a little old-fashioned and a little gloomy until you stepped into the drawing-room, which was furnished certainly with no pretension to modern taste or art, but opened with French windows into a glorious, big, old-world garden.

The house was known by the name of the Gray House, and the old garden as the Gray Garden, but the garden at least bore no resemblance to its neutral-tinted name.  It had green alleys, and sheltering trees, and a great expanse of smoothly kept lawn.  It possessed flower-beds and flower borders innumerable.  There was more than one bower composed entirely of rose-trees, and there were very long hedges of sweet briar and Scotch roses.

The tennis-courts were kept to perfection in the Gray Garden, and all the lasses and boys of Northbury were rejoiced when an invitation came to them to test their skill at a tournament here.  There was no girl in Northbury more popular than Beatrice.  This popularity was unsought.  It came to her because she was gracious and affectionate, of a generous nature, above petty slanders, petty gossips, petty desires.  Life had always been rich and plentiful for her, she possessed abundant health, excellent spirits, and a sunny temper not easily ruffled; she was sympathetic, too, and although, in mind and nature she was many steps above the girls with whom she associated, she was really unconscious of this difference and gave herself no superior airs.  A companion who would have been her equal, whose intellect would have sharpened hers, whose spirit would have matched her own, whose refinement would have delighted and whose affection would have been something to revel in, she had never hitherto known.

Unconscious of her loss she had not deplored it.  It was not until she and Catherine Bertram had flashed a look of delight and sympathy at one another that she first felt stirring within her breast the wings of a new desire.  For the first time she felt unsatisfied and incomplete.  She scarcely knew that she thirsted for Catherine, but this was so.  Catherine awakened all sorts of new emotions in her heart.  She had spent a delightful day with the Bertrams, and hurried home now in the highest spirits.