He did not answer, and they stood looking beyond the thick foliage in the Haunt’s Walk, to the meadows, over which a golden haze shimmered as though it were filled with the beating of invisible wings.

“Molly,” he said suddenly.  “Shall I go after Blossom?”

“Oh, if you would, dear Jonathan,” she answered.

Without a word, he turned from her and walked rapidly down the path Blossom had followed.

When he had disappeared, Molly went up the walk to the Italian garden, and then ascending the front steps passed into the drawing room, where Kesiah and Mrs. Gay sat in the glow of a cedar fire, reading a new life of Lord Byron.

Kesiah’s voice, droning monotonously like the loud hum of bees, rose above the faint crackling of the logs, on which Mrs. Gay had fixed her soft, unfathomable eyes, while she reconstructed, after the habit of her imagination, certain magnificent adventures in the poet’s life.

“Have you seen Jonathan, Molly?” asked Kesiah, laying aside her book while Mrs. Gay wiped her eyes.

“Yes, I left him in the Haunt’s Walk.”

“He has not seemed well of late,” said Mrs. Gay softly, “I am trying to persuade him to leave us and go back to Europe.”

“He is anxious about your health and doesn’t like to go so far away from you,” replied Molly, sitting on an ottoman beside her chair.

Taking her hand, Mrs. Gay caressed it while she answered.

“I can never think of myself when Jonathan’s happiness is to be considered.”  Then dropping her voice still lower, she added tenderly, “You are a great comfort to me, dear, a very great comfort.”

What she meant, and Molly grasped her meaning as distinctly as if she had put it into words, was that she was comforted, she was reassured by the girl’s obvious indifference to Jonathan’s passion.  Like many persons of sentimental turn of mind, she found no great difficulty in reconciling a visionary romanticism with a very practical regard for the more substantial values of life.

“I should never allow the question of my health to interfere with Jonathan’s plans,” she repeated, while her expression grew angelic in the light of her sacrificial fervour.

“I don’t think he wants to go,” retorted Kesiah rather snappily, and opening the book again she began to read.

For an hour her voice droned steadily in the firelight, while Molly, with her head against Mrs. Gay’s knee, looked through the casement window to where the October roses bloomed and dropped in the squares of the Italian garden.  Then at the sound of hurried footsteps on the walk outside, the girl rose from the ottoman and went out, closing the door after her.  In the hall the blanched face of Uncle Abednego confronted her like the face of a spectre.

“I ain’t a-gwine ter tell Miss Angela—­I ain’t a-gwine ter tell Miss Angela,” he moaned, “Marse Jonathan, he’s been shot down yonder at Poplar Spring des like Ole Marster!”