“How beautiful!  I wonder what a foreigner would think of this view?  Or any one who had been long abroad?  How inexpressibly sweet and home-like it would seem to him!”

Hilary turned sharply away, and Johanna saw at once what her words had implied.  She felt so sorry, so vexed with herself; but it was best to leave it alone.  So they made their way homeward, speaking of something else; and then that happened which Johanna had been almost daily expecting would happen, though she dared not communicate her hopes to Hilary, lest they might prove fallacious.

The two figures, both in deep mourning, might have attracted any one’s attention:  they caught that of a gentleman, who was walking quickly and looking about him, as if in search of something.  He passed them at a little distance, then repassed, then turned, holding out both his hands.

“Miss Leaf; I was sure it was you.”

Only the voice; every thing else about him was so changed that Hilary herself would certainly have passed him in the street, that brown, foreign looking, middle aged man, nor recognized him as Robert Lyon.  But for all that it was himself; it was Robert Lyon.

Nobody screamed, nobody fainted.  People seldom do that in real life, even when a friend turns up suddenly from the other end of the world.  They only hold out a warm hand, and look silently in one another’s faces, and try to believe that all is real, as these did.

Robert Lyon shook hands with both ladies, one after the other, Hilary last, then placed himself between them.

“Miss Leaf, will you take my arm?”

The tone, the manner, were so exactly like himself, that in a moment all these intervening years seemed crushed into an atom of time.  Hilary felt certain, morally and absolutely certain, that, in spite of all outward change, he was the same Robert Lyon who had bade them all good-by that Sunday night in the parlor at Stowbury.  The same, even in his love for herself, though he had simply drawn her little hand under his arm, and never spoken a single word.

Hilary Leaf, down, secretly, on your heart’s lowest knees, and thank God!  Repent of all your bitterness, doubts, and pains; be joyful, be joyful!  But, oh, remember to be so humble withal.

She was.  As she walked silently along by Robert Lyon’s side, she pulled down her veil to hide the sweetest, most contrite, most child-like tears.  What did she deserve, more than her neighbors, that she should be so very, very happy?  And when, a good distance across the park, she saw the dark, solitary figure of Elizabeth carrying baby, she quietly guided her companions into a different path, so as to avoid meeting, lest the sight of her happiness might in any way, hurt poor Elizabeth.

“I only landed last night at Southampton,” Mr. Lyon explained to Miss Leaf, after the fashion people have, at such meetings, of falling upon the most practical and uninteresting details.  “I came by the Overland Mail.  It was a sudden journey, I had scarcely more than a few hours’ notice.  The cause of it was some very unpleasant defalcations in our firm.”