“Your house?”

“Yes.  Isn’t it sweet?  Doesn’t it look peacefully old?  I should like to grow old like that, calmly, unafraid and unrepining.  I knew you’d love it.”

He had not said so, but that did not matter.

“There’s a dear old caretaker, with only one tooth in front and such nice eyes, who’ll let us in.  Not an electric bell!”

She gave him a look half confidential, half humorous, and wholly girlish.

“We have to pull it.  That’s so much nicer!”

She pulled, and the dear old caretaker, a woman in Cathedral black, with the look of a verger’s widow all over her, showed the tooth in a smile as she peeped round the door.

“And now the garden!” said Rosamund, in the withdrawn voice of an intense anticipation, half an hour later, when Father Robertson had seen, and been consulted, about everything from kitchen to attic.

She turned round to Mrs. Soper, as the verger’s widow—­indeed she was that!—­was called.

“Shall you mind if we stay a good while in the garden, Mrs. Soper?  It’s so delightful there.  Will it bother you?”

“Most pleased, ma’am!  I couldn’t wish for anything else.  You do hear the chimes most beautiful from there.  But it’s very damp.  That we must allow.”

“Are you afraid of the damp, Father?”

“Not a bit.”

“I knew you wouldn’t be,” she said, almost exultantly.

Mrs. Soper took her stand by the drawing-room window and gazed through the lattice with the deep interest which seems peculiar to provincial towns, and which is seldom manifested in capitals, where the curiosity is rather of the surface than of the very entrails of humanity.  She showed the tooth as she stood, but not in a smile.  She was far too interested in the lady and the white-haired clergyman to smile.

“I shouldn’t wonder but what they’re going to be married!” was her feminine thought, as she watched them walking about the garden, and presently pacing up and down one of the narrow paths, to the far-off wall that bordered one end of the Bishop’s Palace, and back again to the wall near the Dark Entry.  Canon Wilton had not mentioned Rosamund’s name to the verger’s widow, who had no evil thoughts of bigamy.  Presently the chimes sounded in the tower, and Mrs. Soper saw the two visitors pause in their walk to listen.  They both looked upwards towards the Cathedral, and on the lady’s face there was a rapt expression which was remarked by Mrs. Soper.

“She do look religious,” murmured that lady to the tooth.  “She might be a bishop’s lady when she a-stands like that.”

The chimes died away, the visitors resumed their pacing walk, and Mrs. Soper presently retired to the kitchen, which looked out on the passage-way, to cook herself “a bit of something” for the midday staying of her stomach.