“Talking of your beautiful mother, it was said years ago that she was the only woman of whom I had ever been jealous.  I am old enough to tell you these things.  It is the privilege of the old to enlist the sympathies of the young!  But it was not true.  I had every reason to be jealous, as had most women I ever saw, but jealousy in connection with anything so perfect as your mother, I think, was not possible.  Her beauty was of the kind which disarms jealousy.  It was beyond comparison or criticism.  It seemed to belong to another world, and yet she was so tender to the sinners, so understanding, so full of loving kindness.  Hers was a beauty of the soul as well as the body, and that beauty is as remote from the everyday prettiness as the earth is from the stars.  Her expression had something of the divine in it, as if she had seen God face to face.  I see the same look coming in Diana’s face.  Old Sir George used to say it would be worth committing a sin to be forgiven by your mother.  He said her look was a benediction.”

As I said good-by to Lady Mary, she held my hand and said, “Betty dear, you will some day forgive an interfering old woman, and in days to come, when you look to these distant hills, you will remember this day with a kind thought for your beautiful mother’s old friend.”

“Isn’t Lady Mary a darling?” said Diana, as we walked home through the scented lanes on that most wonderful of summer evenings.  “You look as if you had been seeing visions, Betty, quite dazed like, as Nannie used to say.”

“I often see visions,” I said.

“Have you been crying, Aunt Woggles?” said Hugh.  “Were all the peaches gone when you got back?”

Betty slipped her little hand into mine.  “You promised to let me walk with you for a little.  Shall we pick honeysuckle, supposing we see any?”

“Yes, we will, darling.”

“Supposing you can’t reach it,” she said.

“There is always some within reach.”

“I suppose grown-ups can always reach things,” said Betty.

Later, in the quiet darkness of the night, I could picture the garden, the roses, the distant moor, Lady Mary’s beautiful face, but I could not bring myself to believe that I had really heard those words, “I am sure that he cares.”

Surely I had dreamed them, or Lady Mary had, because if they were true, why had he said nothing?  How should he have told her what he could not tell me?

Chapter XVII

Then came that wonderful morning on which I read that Captain Paul Buchanan was coming home, was expected to arrive that very day.  I opened the paper at breakfast, as usual and my eyes caught the word that at any time had the power to set my heart thumping and to send the blood rushing to my head, a word common enough, and which to most people, beyond relating to a country always interesting, means little —­ Africa.  It is curious that a day that is to change the whole of one’s life should begin exactly like any other day.  Of the most important things we have no premonition, most of us.