“I can’t.”  Ann showed signs of returning tears.  “If Aunt lets me go anywhere, I promised to go and help Esther Coombe pick daisies to fix the church for to-morrow.”

Here was chance being kind indeed!  But the doctor dissembled his exultation.

“Hum! too bad.  Where did Miss Esther tell you to go?” he asked guilelessly.

“To the meadow over against the school.”

“What time?”

“Half past two.”

“Well, cheer up, I’ll tell you what—­I’ll go and help Miss Esther pick the daisies.  I can pick quite as fast as you.  And I’ll speak to Aunt Sykes and make it right with her.  So if you run now and get dressed you and Bubble may go just as soon as you’ve had breakfast.  And stay all day.  Be sure you stay all day, mind.”

A good sound hug was the natural answer to this and when the conspirators met at breakfast everything had been satisfactorily arranged.  Ann had her holiday and the doctor’s way lay clear before him.  For all his apparent ignorance Callandar knew that daisy field quite as well as Ann.  It was wild and lonely, yet full of cosy nooks and hollows.  Mild-eyed cows sometimes pastured there.  It was a perfect paradise for meadow-larks.  Could any man ask better than to meet the girl he loved in a field like that?

“You’re not eating a mite, Doctor.”

With a start, Callandar helped himself to marmalade.

* * * * *

So much for the morning of the eventful day.  We have given it in detail because it was so commonplace, so empty of any incident which might have foreshadowed the happenings of the afternoon.  Callandar was restless, but any man is restless under such circumstances.  He found the morning long, but that was natural.  Long afterwards he thought of its slow moving hours, lost in wonder that he should have caught no glimpse, heard no whisper, while all the time, through the beauty of the scented, summer day, the footsteps of inescapable fate drew so swiftly near.  Fortunate indeed for us that the fragile house we dwell in is provided with no windows on the future side, and that the veil of the next moment is as impenetrable as the veil of years.

What are they, anyway, these curious combinations of unforeseen incidents which under the name of “coincidence” startle us out of our dull acceptance of things?  Can it be that, after all, space and circumstance are but pieces in a puzzle to which the key is lost, so that, playing blindly, we are startled by the click which announces the falling of some corner of the puzzle into place?  Or is it merely that we are all more closely linked than we know, and is “coincidence” but the flashing of one of numberless invisible links into the light of common day?  Some day we shall know all about it; in the meantime a little wonder will do us good.