“I believe I do!” he admitted—­“You see an old fogey like myself is bound to have hobbies, and my particular hobby is gardening.  I love flowers, and I go everywhere I can, or may, to see them and watch their growth.  So that for years I have visited your rose-garden, Miss Vancourt!  I have been a regular and persistent trespasser,—­but all the same, I have never plucked a rose.”

“Well, I wish you had!” said Maryllia, feeling somewhat impatient with him for calling himself an ’old fogey,’—­why did he give himself away?—­she thought,—­“I wish you had plucked them all and handed them round in baskets to the villagers, especially to the old and sick persons.  It would have been much better than to have had them sold at Riversford through Oliver Leach.”

“Did he sell them?” exclaimed John, quickly—­“I am not surprised!”

“He sold everything, and put the money in his own pocket”—­said Maryllia,—­“But, after all, the loss is quite my own fault.  I ought to have enquired into the management of the property myself.  And I certainly ought not to have stayed away from home so many years.  But it’s never too late to mend!” She smiled, and advancing a step or two called “Cicely!”

Cicely turned, looking up from beneath her spreading canopy of dark cedar boughs.

“Oh, Maryllia, we’re having such fun!” she exclaimed—­“Mr. Adderley is talking words, and I’m talking music!  We’ll show you how it goes presently!”

“Do, please!” laughed Maryllia; “It must be delightful!  Mr. Walden and I are going into the rose-garden.  We shall be back in a few minutes!”

She moved along, her white dress floating softly over the green turf, its delicate flounces and knots of rosy ribbon looking like a trail of living flowers.  Walden, walking at her side, nodded smilingly as he passed close by Cicely and Julian, his tall athletic figure contrasting well with Maryllia’s fairy-like grace,—­and presently, crossing from the lawn to what was called the ’Cherry-Tree Walk,’ because the path led under an arched trellis work over which a couple of hundred cherry-trees were trained to form a long arbour or pergola, they turned down it, and drawing closer together in conversation, under the shower of white blossoms that shed fragrance above their heads, they disappeared.  Cicely, struck by a certain picturesqueness, or what she would have called a ’stage effect’ in the manner of their exit, stopped abruptly in the pianissimo humming of a tune with which she declared she had been suddenly inspired by some lines Adderley had just recited.

“Isn’t she pretty!” she said, indicating with a jerk of her ever gesticulating hand the last luminous glimmer of Maryllia’s vanishing gown—­“She’s like Titania,—­or Kilmeny in Fairyland.  Why don’t you write something about her, instead of about some girl you ‘imagine’ and never see?”

Adderley, lying at his ease on the grass, turned on his arm and likewise looked after the two figures that had just passed, as it seemed, into a paradise of snowy flowers.