“But Maryllia would never fall in love with a parson!” declared Cicely, almost resentfully—­“A parson!—­a country parson too!  The idea is perfectly ridiculous!”

A glimmer of white in the vista of the flowering ‘Cherry-Tree Walk’ here suddenly appeared and warned her that Maryllia and the Reverend John were returning from their inspection of the rose-garden.  She cheeked herself in an outburst of speech and silently watched them approaching.  Adderley watched them too with a kind of lachrymose interest.  They were deep in conversation, and Maryllia carried a bunch of white and blush roses which she had evidently just gathered.  She looked charmingly animated, and now and then a light ripple of her laughter floated out on the air as sweet as the songs of the birds chirming around them.

“The roses are perfectly lovely!” she exclaimed delightedly, as she came under the shadow of the great cedar-tree; “Mr. Walden says he has never seen the standards so full of bud.”  Here she held the cluster she had gathered under Cicely’s nose.  “Aren’t they delicious!  Oh, by the bye, Mr. Walden, I have promised you one!  You must have it, in return for the spray of lilac you gave me when I came to see your garden!  Now you must take a rose from mine!” And, laying all the roses on Cicely’s lap, she selected one delicate half-opened, blush-white bloom.  “Shall I put it in your coat for you?”

“If you will so far honour me!” answered Walden;—­he was strangely pale, and a slight tremor passed over him as he looked down at the small fingers,—­pink-tipped as the petals of the flower they so deftly fastened in his buttonhole; “And how”—­he continued, with an effort, addressing Cicely and Julian—­“How have Music and Poetry got on together?”

“Oh, we’re not married yet,”—­said Cicely, shaking off the dumb spell which Adderley’s ‘suggestion’ had for a moment cast upon her mind—­“We ought to be, of course,—­for a real good opera.  But we’re only just beginning courtship.  Mr. Adderley has recited some lines of his own composition, and I have improvised some music.  You shall hear the result some day.”

“Why not now?” queried Maryllia, as she seated herself in another chair next to Cicely’s under the cedar boughs, and signed to Walden to do the same.

“Why, because I believe that the tea is about to arrive.  I saw the majestic Primmins in the distance, wrestling with a table—­didn’t you, Mr. Adderley?”

Adderley rose from his half recumbent position on the grass, and shading his eyes from the afternoon sunshine, looked towards the house.

“Yes,—­it is even so!” he replied—­“Primmins and a subordinate are on the way hither with various creature comforts.  Music and Poetry must pause awhile.  Yet why should there be a pause?  It is for this that I am a follower of Omar Kayyam.  He was a materialist as well as a spiritualist, and his music admits of the aforesaid creature comforts as much as the exalted and subtle philosophies and ironies of life.”