“Aunt Harriet always goes to sleep in her chair after a cup of tea,” Annie had said and had then blushed redly.

“Does she?” asked Von Rosen with apparent absent-mindedness but in reality, keenly.  He excused himself for a moment, left Annie standing in the pergola and hurried back to the house, where he interviewed Jane Riggs, and told her not to make any noise, as Miss Eustace in the library would probably fall asleep, as was her wont after a cup of tea.  Jane Riggs assented, but she looked after him with a long, slow look.  Then she nodded her head stiffly and went on washing cups and saucers quietly.  She spoke only one short sentence to herself.  “He’s a man and it’s got to be somebody.  Better be her than anybody else.”

When the two at the end of the pergola began talking, it was strangely enough about the affair of the Syrian girl.

“I suppose, have always supposed, that the poor young thing’s husband came and stole his little son,” said Von Rosen.

“You would have adopted him?” asked Annie in a shy voice.

“I think I would not have known any other course to take,” replied Von Rosen.

“It was very good of you,” Annie said.  She cast a little glance of admiration at him.

Von Rosen laughed.  “It is not goodness which counts to one’s credit when one is simply chucked into it by Providence,” he returned.

Annie laughed.  “To think of your speaking of Providence as ‘chucking.’”

“It is rather awful,” admitted Von Rosen, “but somehow I never do feel as if I need be quite as straight-laced with you.”

“Mr. von Rosen, you have talked with me exactly twice, and I am at a loss as to whether I should consider that remark of yours as a compliment or not.”

“I meant it for one,” said Von Rosen earnestly.  “I should not have used that expression.  What I meant was I felt that I could be myself with you, and not weigh words or split hairs.  A clergyman has to do a lot of that, you know, Miss Eustace, and sometimes (perhaps all the time) he hates it; it makes him feel like a hypocrite.”

“Then it is all right,” said Annie rather vaguely.  She gazed up at the weave of leaves and blossoms, then down at the wavering carpet of their shadows.

“It is lovely here,” she said.

The young man looked at the slender young creature in the blue gown and smiled with utter content.

“It is very odd,” he said, “but nothing except blue and that particular shade of blue would have harmonised.”

“I should have said green or pink.”

“They would surely have clashed.  If you can’t melt into nature, it is much safer to try for a discord.  You are much surer to chord.  That blue does chord, and I doubt if a green would not have been a sort of swear word in colour here.”

“I am glad you like it,” said Annie like a school girl.  She felt very much like one.

“I like you,” Von Rosen said abruptly.