a matter of fact it was in the old walled garden a quarter of a mile away—­with a gallant young fellow’s arms about her and her head on his shoulder.  A bumble-bee had droned round her while they kissed.  She could never hear a bumble-bee without thinking of it.  But the gallant young fellow had been killed in the Soudan in eighteen eighty-five, and Ursula Winwood’s heart had been buried in his sandy grave.  That was the beginning and end of her sentimental history.  She had recovered from the pain of it all and now she .Loved the bumble-bee for invoking the exquisite memory.  The lithe Sussex spaniel crept farther on her lap and her hand caressed his polished coat.  Drowsiness disintegrated the exquisite memories.  Miss Ursula Winwood fell asleep.

The sudden plunging of strong young paws into her body and a series of sharp barks and growls awakened her with a start, and, for a second, still dazed by the drowsy invocation of the bumble-bee, she saw approaching her the gallant fellow who had been pierced through the heart by a Soudanese spear in eighteen eighty-five.  He was dark and handsome, and, by a trick of coincidence, was dressed in loose knickerbocker suit, just as he was when he had walked up that very avenue to say his last good-bye.  She remained for a moment tense, passively awaiting co-ordination of her faculties.  Then clear awake, and sending scudding the dear ghosts of the past, she sat up, and catching the indignant spaniel by the collar, looked with a queer, sudden interest at the newcomer.  He was young, extraordinarily beautiful; but he staggered and reeled like a drunken man.  The spaniel barked his respectable disapproval.  In his long life of eighteen months he had seen many people, postmen and butcher boys and casual diggers in kitchen gardens, whose apparent permit to exist in Drane’s Court had been an insoluble puzzle; but never had he seen so outrageous a trespasser.  With unparalleled moral courage he told him exactly what he thought of him.  But the trespasser did not hear.  He kept on advancing.  Miss Winwood rose, disgusted, and drew herself up.  The young man threw out his hands towards her, tripped over the three-inch-high border of grass, and fell in a sprawling heap at her feet.

He lay very still.  Ursula Winwood looked down upon him.  The shiny brown spaniel took up a strategic position three yards away and growled, his chin between his paws.  But the more Miss Winwood looked, and her blue eyes were trained to penetrate, the more was she convinced that both she and the dog were wrong in their diagnosis.  The young man’s face was deadly white, his cheeks gaunt.  It was evidently a grave matter.  For a moment or so she had a qualm of fear lest he might be dead.  She bent down, took him in her capable grip and composed his inert body decently, and placed the knapsack he was wearing beneath his head.  The faintly beating heart proved him to be alive, but her touch on his brow discovered fever.  Kneeling by his side, she wiped his lips with her handkerchief, and gave herself up to the fraction of a minute’s contemplation of the most beautiful youth she had ever seen.  So there he lay, a new Endymion, while the most modern of Dianas hung over him, stricken with great wonderment at his perfection.