“Papa wants to have the garden ploughed,” said Eugenia.  “He says it takes too much time to hoe it.  Give me your knife, please.”

He opened the blade, and she stooped to cut off a crimson dahlia while the Indian summer sunshine slanted from the west upon her dark head and white dress.  Over all was the faint violet haze of the season, hanging above the gay old garden like a delicate effluvium from autumns long decayed.

“There aren’t many old-time gardens left,” said Nicholas regretfully, “but I like this one best of all.  I always think of you in the midst of it.”

“Yes, we used to gather calacanthus blossoms and trade them for taffy at school.  The bushes are almost all dead now.  That is the only one left.”

She laid the knife upon the grass and raised her arms to fasten a yellow chrysanthemum in her hair.  As it lay against her ear it cast a clear, golden light upon her cheek, as warm as the late sunshine.

“Flowers suit you,” he said.

“Do they?” she smiled in a quick, pleased way.  “Is it because I love them?”

“It is because you are beautiful,” he answered bluntly.

Some one had once called Eugenia’s besetting vanity the love of giving pleasure; it was, perhaps, in reality, the pleasure of being loved.  It was not the fact that she might be beautiful that now warmed her so gratefully, but the evidence that Nicholas was good enough to consider her so.

“You have seen so few girls,” she remarked reasonably enough.

“I may see many, but it won’t alter my view of you.”

“How can you tell?”

He shook his head impatiently.

“I shan’t tell.  I shall prove it.”

“And when you have proved it where shall I be?—­old and toothless?”

“May be—­but still beautiful.”

There was a glow in her face, but she did not reply.  His eyes and the last, long ray of sunshine were upon her.  He was revoking from an old October a dark-haired, clear-eyed girl amid the dahlias, and it seemed to him that Eugenia had shot up in a season like one of the stately flowers.  As she stood in the grass-grown walk, her skirt half-filled with blossoms, her white hands lifting the thin folds above her ruffled petticoat, she appeared to be the vital apparition of the place—­a harbinger of the vivid sunlight and the dark shadows of the passing of the year.

“See how many!” she exclaimed, holding her lapful towards him.  “You may take your choice—­only not that last pink papa loves.”

He plunged his hands amid the confusion of colours and drew out a yellow chrysanthemum.

“I like this,” he said simply.

She laughed.  “But it doesn’t suit your hair,” she suggested.

He met her sally gravely.

“It is my favourite flower,” he returned.

“Since when, pray?”

“Since—­since a half-hour ago.”

He stooped and picked up his knife from the grass.