“Some of it might have been passed in just such a garden as this within sound of bells.”

With a change of voice she added: 

“How Robin will love it!”

“The life you will never live?” said the Canon, smiling gravely.

“No, the garden.”

“Then you haven’t a doubt?”

“Oh no.  When I know a thing there’s no room in me for hesitation.  I shall love being here with Robin as I have never loved anything yet.”

The quarter struck in the Cathedral tower.

“Very different from South Africa!” said Canon Wilton.

Rosamund knitted her brows for a moment.

“I wonder whether Dion will come back altered,” she said.

“D’you wish him to?”

She got up from the window-seat, put out her hand, and softly pulled the lattice towards her.

“Not in most ways.  He’s so dear as he is.  It would all depend on the alteration.”

She latched the window gently, and again looked at the garden through it.

“I may be altered, too, by living here!” she said.  “All alone with Robin.  I think I shall be.”

Canon Wilton made no comment.  He was thinking: 

“And when the two, altered, come together again, if they ever do, what then?”

He had noticed that Rosamund never seemed to think of Dion’s death in South Africa as a possibility.  When she spoke of him she assumed his return as a matter of course.  Did she never think of death, then?  Did she, under the spell of her radiant and splendidly healthy youth, forget all the tragic possibilities?  He wondered, but he did not ask.

Mr. Robertson arrived at the Canon’s house just in time for the afternoon service—­“my Wilderness service,” as Rosamund called it.  The bells were ringing as he drove up with his modest luggage, and Rosamund had already gone to the Cathedral and was seated in a stall.

“I should like to have half an hour’s quiet meditation in church before the service begins,” she had remarked to Canon Wilton.  And the Canon had put her in a stall close to where he would presently be sitting, and had then hurried back to meet Father Robertson.

“My Welsley!” was Rosamund’s thought as she sat in her stall, quite alone, looking up at the old jeweled glass in the narrow Gothic windows, at the wonderful somber oak, age-colored, of the return stalls and canopy beneath which Canon Wilton, as Canon-in-Residence, would soon be sitting at right angles to her, at the distant altar lifted on high and backed by a delicate marble screen, beyond which stretched a further, tranquilly obscure vista of the great church.  The sound of the bells ringing far above her head in the gray central tower was heard by her, but only just heard, as we hear the voices of the past murmuring of old memories and of deeds which are almost forgotten.  Distant footsteps echoed among the great tombs of stone and of marble, which commemorated the dead who had served God in that place in the gray years gone by.  In her nostrils there seemed to be a perfume, like an essence of concentrated prayers sent up among these stone traceries, these pointed arches, these delicate columns, by generations of believers.  She felt wrapped in a robe never woven by hands, in a robe that gave warmth to her spirit.