“What is funny?” asked Mrs. Arbuthnot, her face clearing because Mrs. Wilkins laughed.

“We are.  This is.  Everything.  It’s all so wonderful.  It’s so funny and so adorable that we should be in it.  I daresay when we finally reach heaven—­the one they talk about so much—­we shan’t find it a bit more beautiful.”

Mrs. Arbuthnot relaxed to smiling security again.  “Isn’t it divine?” she said?

“Were you ever, ever in your life so happy?” asked Mrs. Wilkins, catching her by the arm.

“No,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot.  Nor had she been; not ever; not even in her first love-days with Frederick.  Because always pain had been close at hand in that other happiness, ready to torture with doubts, to torture even with the very excess of her love; while this was the simple happiness of complete harmony with her surroundings, the happiness that asks for nothing, that just accepts, just breathes, just is.

“Let’s go and look at that tree close,” said Mrs. Wilkins.  “I don’t believe it can only be a tree.”

And arm in arm they went along the hall, and their husbands would not have known them their faces were so young with eagerness, and together they stood at the open window, and when their eyes, having feasted on the marvelous pink thing, wandered farther among the beauties of the garden, they saw sitting on the low wall at the east edge of it, gazing out over the bay, her feet in lilies, Lady Caroline.

They were astonished.  They said nothing in their astonishment, but stood quite still, arm in arm, staring down at her.

She too had on a white frock, and her head was bare.  They had had no idea that day in London, when her hat was down to her nose and her furs were up to her ears, that she was so pretty.  They had merely thought her different from the other women in the club, and so had the other women themselves, and so had all the waitresses, eyeing her sideways and eyeing her again as they passed the corner where she sat talking; but they had had no idea she was so pretty.  She was exceedingly pretty.  Everything about her was very much that which it was.  Her fair hair was very fair, her lovely grey eyes were very lovely and grey, her dark eyelashes were very dark, her white skin was very white, her red mouth was very red.  She was extravagantly slender—­ the merest thread of a girl, though not without little curves beneath her thin frock where little curves should be.  She was looking out across the bay, and was sharply defined against the background of empty blue.  She was full in the sun.  Her feet dangled among the leaves and flowers of the lilies just as if it did not matter that they should be bent or bruised.

“She ought to have a headache,” whispered Mrs. Arbuthnot at last, “sitting there in the sun like that.”

“She ought to have a hat,” whispered Mrs. Wilkins.

“She is treading on lilies.”

“But they’re hers as much as ours.”