That was all right, then.  Slowly, from this point, suggestions expanded themselves.  The future could be, if he willed it, one long serene triumph of love, and lofty intellectual companionship, and existence softened and enriched at every point by all that wealth could command, and the most exquisite tastes suggest.  Should he will it!  Ah! the question answered itself.  But he could not enter upon this beckoning heaven of a future until he had freed himself.  When Celia said to him, “Come!” he must not be in the position to reply, “I should like to, but unfortunately I am tied by the leg.”  He should have to leave Octavius, leave the ministry, leave everything.  He could not begin too soon to face these contingencies.

Very likely Celia had not thought it out as far as this.  With her, it was a mere vague “sometime I may.”  But the harder masculine sense, Theron felt, existed for the very purpose of correcting and giving point to these loose feminine notions of time and space.  It was for him to clear away the obstacles, and map the plans out with definite decision.

One warm afternoon, as he lolled in his easy-chair under the open window of his study, musing upon the ever-shifting phases of this vast, complicated, urgent problem, some chance words from the sidewalk in front came to his ears, and, coming, remained to clarify his thoughts.

Two ladies whose voices were strange to him had stopped—­as so many people almost daily stopped—­to admire the garden of the parsonage.  One of them expressed her pleasure in general terms.  Said the other—­

“My husband declares those dahlias alone couldn’t be matched for thirty dollars, and that some of those gladiolus must have cost three or four dollars apiece.  I know we’ve spent simply oceans of money on our garden, and it doesn’t begin to compare with this.”

“It seems like a sinful waste to me,” said her companion.

“No-o,” the other hesitated.  “No, I don’t think quite that—­if you can afford it just as well as not.  But it does seem to me that I’d rather live in a little better house, and not spend it all on flowers.  Just look at that cactus!”

The voices died away.  Theron sat up, with a look of arrested thought upon his face, then sprang to his feet and moved hurriedly through the parlor to an open front window.  Peering out with caution he saw that the two women receding from view were fashionably dressed and evidently came from homes of means.  He stared after them in a blank way until they turned a corner.

He went into the hall then, put on his frock-coat and hat, and stepped out into the garden.  He was conscious of having rather avoided it heretofore—­not altogether without reasons of his own, lying unexamined somewhere in the recesses of his mind.  Now he walked slowly about, and examined the flowers with great attentiveness.  The season was advancing, and he saw that many plants had gone out of bloom.  But what a magnificent plenitude of blossoms still remained!