“It’s dreadful to think of a very lonely child,” he said.

“But some people have to be lonely all their lives,” said Molly.

Sir Edmund was touched.  She had raised her head and looked at him with a pleading confidence.  Then, with one swift movement, she was suddenly kneeling and tearing to pieces two or three primroses in succession.

“Some people have to say things that can never be really said, or else keep everything shut up.”

“Don’t you think they may make a mistake, and that the things can be said—­” He hesitated; he did not want to press her unfairly into confidence; “to the right person?” he concluded rather lamely.

“Who is to find the right person?” said Molly bitterly; “the right person is easy to find for people who have just ordinary cares and difficulties, but the people who are in real difficulties don’t easily find the right person.  I doubt if he or she exists myself!”

She turned to find Edmund Grosse looking at her with far too much meaning in his face; there was a degree and intensity of interest in his look that might be read in more than one way.

Molly blushed with the simplicity suited to seventeen rather than to twenty-one.  She was very near to the first outpouring in her life, the torrent of her pent-up thoughts and feelings was pressing against the flood-gates.  It seemed to her that she had never known true and real sympathy before she felt that look.  She held out her hands towards him with a little unconscious gesture of appeal.

“I have had a strange life,” she said; “I am in very strange circumstances now.”

But Edmund suddenly got up, and before she could speak again a slight sound on the path showed her that some one was coming.

Rose, finding every one dispersed, had taken a walk by herself in the wood.  She was glad to be alone; she felt the presence of God in the woods as very near and intimate.  Her mind had one of those moments of complete rest and feeding on beautiful things which come to those who have known great mental suffering in their lives, and to whom the world is not giving its gaudy preoccupations.  So, walking amidst the glory of spring lit by a spiritual sunshine, Rose came round a little stunted yew-tree to find Molly kneeling on the ground ivy, and Edmund standing by her.  Molly rose in one movement to her full height, as if her legs possessed no jointed impediments, and a fiercely negative expression filled the grey eyes.  Rose’s kind hand had unwittingly slammed the flood-gates in the moment they had opened; and Edmund, seeing that look, and feeling the air electric, suddenly reverted to a belief in Molly’s sense of guilt towards Rose.

For the fraction of a second Rose looked helplessly at Edmund, and then held out a little bunch of violets to Molly.

“Won’t you have these?  There; they suit so well with your gown.”

With a quick and very gentle touch she put the violets into Molly’s belt, and smiled at her with the sunshine that was all about them.