“It’s only Mother, Sweet!  Are you warm enough, dear?  You feel beautifully warm!  Let Mother turn you over—­so!”

“Is it morning, Mother?” murmured Anna.

“No, my heart!  Mother’s just going to bed.”  And ten minutes later Julia was asleep, her face as serene as the child’s own.

The morning brought her only a shamed memory of the night before and its moods, and as Richie was quite his natural self, Julia determined to dismiss the matter as a passing moment of misinterpreted sentiment on both their parts.  To-day was a Sunday, so perfect that they had breakfast on the porch, and in the afternoon took a long climb on the mountainside, across patches of blossoming manzanita, and through meadows sweet with the liquid note of rising larks.  They came back in the twilight:  Anna limp and drowsy on Richard’s shoulders, Miss Toland admitting to fatigue, but all three ready to agree with Julia’s estimate that it had been a wonderful Sunday.

But night brought to two of them that new and strange self-consciousness that each had been secretly dreading all day.  Julia fought it as she might have fought the oncoming of a physical ill, yet inexorably it arrived.  Supper was an ordeal, she found speech difficult, she could hardly raise her eyes.

“Julie, you’re as rosy as a little gipsy,” said Miss Toland approvingly.  “Doesn’t colour become her, Rich?”

“She looks fine,” Richard muttered, almost inarticulately.  Julia looked up only long enough to give Miss Toland a pained and fluttering smile.  She was glad of an excuse to disappear with Anna, when the little girl’s bedtime arrived, and lingered so long in the bedroom that Miss Toland came and rapped on the door.

“Julia!  What are you doing?” called the older woman impatiently.  Julia came to the door.

“Why, I’m so tired, Aunt Sanna,” she began smilingly.

“Tired, nonsense!” Miss Toland said roundly.  “Come sit on the porch with Richie and me.  It’s like summer out of doors, and there’ll be a moon!”

So Julia went to take her place on the porch steps, with a great curved branch of the white rose arching over her head, and the fragrant stretch of the grassy hilltop sloping away, at her feet, to the valley far below.  Miss Toland dozed, and the younger people talked a little, and were silent for long spaces between the little casual sentences that to-night seemed so full of meaning.

The next day Julia went home, to Miss Toland’s disgust and to little Anna’s sorrow.  Richie drove Julia and the little girl to the train; there was no explanation needed between them; at parting they looked straight into each other’s eyes.

“Ask us to come again some day,” Julia said.  “Not too soon, but as soon as you can.  And don’t let us ever feel that we’ve done anything that will hurt or distress you, Richie.”

“You and Anna are both angels,” Richard answered.  “Only tell me that you forgive me, Julie; that things after this will be just as they were before?”