“Please God,” thought poor Billy, “I will make her happy.  Yes, please God, I can at least do that, since she cares for me.”

Then he kissed her.

“My dear,” said he, aloud, “I’ll try to make you happy.  And—­and you don’t mind, do you, if I leave you now?” queried this ardent lover.  “You see, it’s absolutely necessary I should see—­see Miss Hugonin about this will business.  You don’t mind very much, do you—­darling?” Mr. Woods inquired of her, the last word being rather obviously an afterthought.

“No,” said she.  “Not if you must—­dear.”

Billy went away, lugging a heart of lead in his breast.

Kathleen stared after him and gave a hard, wringing motion of her hands.  She had done what many women do daily; the thing is common and sensible and universally commended; but in her own eyes, the draggled trollop of the pavements was neither better nor worse than she.

At the entrance of the next walkway Billy encountered Felix
Kennaston—­alone and in the most ebulliently mirthful of humours.

XX

But we had left Mr. Kennaston, I think, in company with Miss Hugonin, at the precise moment she inquired of him whether it were not the strangest thing in the world—­referring thereby to the sudden manner in which she had been disinherited.

The poet laughed and assented.  Afterward, turning north from the front court, they descended past the shield-bearing griffins—­and you may depend upon it that each shield is adorned with a bas-relief of the Eagle—­that guard the broad stairway leading to the formal gardens of Selwoode.  The gardens stretch northward to the confines of Peter Blagden’s estate of Gridlington; and for my part—­unless it were that primitive garden that Adam lost—­I can imagine no goodlier place.

On this particular forenoon, however, neither Miss Hugonin nor Felix Kennaston had eyes for its comeliness; silently they braved the griffins, and in silence they skirted the fish-pond—­silver-crinkling in the May morning—­and passed through cloistral ilex-shadowed walks, and amphitheatres of green velvet, and terraces ample and mellow in the sunlight, silently.  The trees pelted them with blossoms; pedestaled in leafy recesses, Satyrs grinned at them apishly, and the arrows of divers pot-bellied Cupids threatened them, and Fauns piped for them ditties of no tone; the birds were about shrill avocations overhead, and everywhere the heatless, odourful air was a caress; but for all this, Miss Hugonin and Mr. Kennaston were silent and very fidgetty.

Margaret was hatless—­and the glory of the eminently sensible spring sun appeared to centre in her hair—­and violet-clad; and the gown, like most of her gowns, was all tiny tucks and frills and flounces, diapered with semi-transparencies—­unsubstantial, foam-like, mere violet froth.  As she came starry-eyed through the gardens, the impudent wind trifling with her hair, I protest she might have been some lady of Oberon’s court stolen out of Elfland to bedevil us poor mortals, with only a moonbeam for the changeable heart of her, and for raiment a violet shadow spirited from the under side of some big, fleecy cloud.