“Is your sister busy?” asked the Canon, after greeting Beatrice.

Beatrice smiled faintly.

“She’s in her den.  What do you think she is doing?”

The Canon looked hard at her, and he too smiled.

“Not writing again to Mrs. Browning?”

Beatrice nodded, and sat gently down on the window-seat.

“Begging and praying for an extension.”

“I’ve never seen any one so in love with a place as your sister is with Welsley.”

He sat down near Beatrice.

“But it is attractive, isn’t it?” she said.

She turned her head slowly and looked out of the open window to the enclosed garden which was bathed in mellow sunshine.  The sky above the gray Cathedral towers was a clear and delicate, not deep, blue.  Above the mossy red wall of the garden appeared the ruined arches of the cloisters which gave to the house its name.  Among them some doves were cooing.  Up in the blue, about the pinnacles of the towers, the rooks were busily flying.  Robin, in a little loose shirt, green knickerbockers, and a tiny soft white hat set well on the back of his head, was gardening just below the window with the intensity that belongs to the dawn.  His bare brown legs moved rapidly, as he ran from place to place carrying earth, a plant, a bright red watering-pot.  The gardener, a large young man, with whom Robin was evidently on the most friendly, and even intimate, terms, was working with him, and apparently under his close and constant supervision.  A thrush with very bright eyes looked on from an adjacent elder bush.  Upon the wall, near the end of the Bishop’s Palace, a black cat was sunning itself and lazily attending to its toilet.

“It’s the very place for Rosamund,” said Beatrice, after a pause, during which she drank in Welsley.  “She seems to know and love every stick and stone in it.”

“And almost every man, woman and child,” said the Canon.  “She began by captivating the Precincts,—­not such an easy task either, for a bishop usually has not the taste of a dean, and minor canons think very lightly of the praises of an archdeacon,—­and she has ended by captivating the whole city.  Even the wives of the clergy sing her praises with one accord.  It’s the greatest triumph in the history of the church.”

“You see she likes them and is thoroughly interested in all their little affairs.”

“Yes, it’s genuine sympathy.  She makes Welsley her world, and so Welsley thinks the world of her.”

He looked across at Beatrice for a moment meditatively, and then said: 

“And when her husband comes back?”

“Dion!  Well, then, of course——­”

She hesitated, and in the silence the drawing-room door opened and Rosamund came in, holding an open letter in her hand, knitting her brows, and looking very grave and intense.  She greeted the Canon with her usual warm cordiality, but still looked grave and preoccupied.