‘I had no idea there was such a lovely green spot in the city,’ Ladywell continued, passing out.  ’Trees too, planted in the manner of an orchard.  What a charming place!’

The place was truly charming just at that date.  The untainted leaves of the lime and plane trees and the newly-sprung grass had in the sun a brilliancy of beauty that was brought into extraordinary prominence by the sable soil showing here and there, and the charcoaled stems and trunks out of which the leaves budded:  they seemed an importation, not a produce, and their delicacy such as would perish in a day.

‘What is this round tower?’ Ladywell said again, walking towards the iron-grey bastion, partly covered with ivy and Virginia creeper, which stood obtruding into the enclosure.

‘O, didn’t you know that was here?  That’s a piece of the old city wall,’ said Neigh, looking furtively around at the same time.  Behind the bastion the churchyard ran into a long narrow strip, grassed like the other part, but completely hidden from it by the cylinder of ragged masonry.  On rounding this projection, Ladywell beheld within a few feet of him a lady whom he knew too well.

‘Mrs. Petherwin here!’ exclaimed he, proving how ignorant he had been of the composition of the party he was to meet, and accounting at the same time for his laxity in attending it.

‘I forgot to tell you,’ said Neigh awkwardly, behind him, ’that Mrs. Petherwin was to come with us.’

Ethelberta’s look was somewhat blushful and agitated, as if from some late transaction:  she appeared to have been secluding herself there till she should have recovered her equanimity.  However, she came up to him and said, ’I did not see you before this moment:  we had been thinking you would not come.’

While these words were being prettily spoken, Ladywell’s face became pale as death.  On Ethelberta’s bosom were the stem and green calyx of a rose, almost all its flower having disappeared.  It had been a Harlequin rose, for two or three of its striped leaves remained to tell the tale.

She could not help noticing his fixed gaze, and she said quickly, ’Yes, I have lost my pretty rose:  this may as well go now,’ and she plucked the stem from its fastening in her dress and flung it away.

Poor Ladywell turned round to meet Mr. and Mrs. Belmaine, whose voices were beginning to be heard just within the church door, leaving Neigh and Ethelberta together.  It was a graceful act of young Ladywell’s that, in the midst of his own pain at the strange tale the rose-leaves suggested—­Neigh’s rivalry, Ethelberta’s mutability, his own defeat—­he was not regardless of the intense embarrassment which might have been caused had he remained.

The two were silent at first, and it was evident that Ethelberta’s mood was one of anger at something that had gone before.  She turned aside from him to follow the others, when Neigh spoke in a tone somewhat bitter and somewhat stern.