So Constance and Gordon and Aunt Isabelle had gone off, and with Barry at Leila’s, Mary was at last alone.

Alone in the house with Roger Poole!

Her little plans were all made, and she went to work at once to execute them.

It was a dull afternoon, and the old-fashioned drawing-room, with its dying fire, and pale carpet, its worn stuffed furniture and pallid mirrors looked dreary.

Mary had Susan Jenks replenish the fire.  Then she drew up to it one of the deep stuffed chairs and a lighter one of mahogany, which matched the low tea-table which was at the left of the fireplace.  She set a tapestry screen so that it cut off this corner from the rest of the room and from the door.

Gordon had brought, the night before, a great box of flowers, and there were valley lilies among them.  Mary put the lilies on the table in a jar of gray-green pottery.  Then she went up-stairs and changed the street costume which she had worn to church for her old green velvet gown.  When she came down, the fire was snapping, and the fragrance of the lilies made sweet the screened space—­Susan had placed on the little table a red lacquered tray, and an old silver kettle.

Susan had also delivered the note which Mary had given her to the Tower Rooms.

Until Roger came down Mary readjusted and rearranged everything.  She felt like a little girl who plays at keeping house.  Some new sense seemed waked within her, a sense which made her alive to the coziness and comfort and seclusion of this cut-off corner.  She found herself trying to see it all through Roger Poole’s eyes.

When he came at last around the corner of the screen, she smiled and gave him her hand.

“This is to be our hour together.  I had to plan for it.  Did you ever feel that the world was so full of people that there was no corner in which to be—­alone?”

As he sat down in the big chair, and the light shone on his face, she saw how tired he looked, as if the days and the nights since she had seen him, had been days and nights of vigil.

She felt a surging sense of sympathy, which set her trembling as she had trembled when she had touched his letter as it had laid on her desk, but when she spoke her voice was steady.

“I am going to make you a cup of tea—­then we can talk.”

He watched her as she made it, her deft hands unadorned, except by the one quaint ring, the whiteness of her skin set on by her green gown, the whiteness of her soul symbolized by the lilies.

He leaned forward and spoke suddenly.  “Mary Ballard,” he said, “if I ever reach paradise, I shall pray that it may be like this, with the golden light and the fragrance, and you in the midst of it.”

Earnestly over the lilies, she looked at him.  “Then you believe in Paradise?”

“I should like to think that in some blessed future state I should come upon you in a garden of lilies.”