"Grandmother?"

"I hear you, Dick. Good-night."

"Is there anything you want done? Think, dear grandmother."

"Don't let Exmouth come to my funeral. I don't want him--grinning

over--my coffin."

"Any other thing?"

"Put me beside Jack Capel. I wonder--if I shall--see Jack." A shadow,

gray and swift, passed over her face. Her eyes flashed one piteous look

into Hyde's eyes, and then closed forever.

And while in the rainy, dreary London twilight Lady Capel was dying,

Katherine was in the garden at Hyde Manor, watching the planting of

seeds that were in a few weeks to be living things of beauty and

sweetness. It had ceased raining at noon in Norfolk, and the gravel

walks were perfectly dry, and the air full of the fragrance of

innumerable violets. All the level land was wearing buttercups. Full of

secrets, of fluttering wings, and building nests were the trees. In the

apple-blooms the bees were humming, delirious with delight. From the

beehives came the peculiar and exquisite odour of virgin wax. Somewhere

near, also, the gurgle of running water spread an air of freshness all

around.

And Katherine, with a little basket full of flower-seeds, was going with

the gardener from bed to bed, watching him plant them. No one who had

seen her in the childlike loveliness of her early girlhood could have

imagined the splendour of her matured beauty. She had grown "divinely

tall," and the exercise of undisputed authority had added a gracious

stateliness of manner. Her complexion was wonderful, her large blue eyes

shining with tender lights, her face full of sympathetic revelations.

Above all, she had that nameless charm which comes from a freedom from

all anxious thought for the morrow; that charm of which the sweet secret

is generally lost after the twentieth summer. Her basket of seeds was

clasped to her side within the hollow of her left arm, and with her

right hand she lifted a long petticoat of quilted blue satin. Above this

garment she wore a gown of wood-coloured taffeta, sprigged with

rose-buds, and a stomacher of fine lace to match the deep rufflings on

her elbow-sleeves.

Little Joris was with his mother, running hither and thither, as his

eager spirits led him: now pausing to watch her drop from her white

fingers the precious seed into its prepared bed, anon darting after some

fancied joy among the pyramidal yews, and dusky treillages, and cradle

walks of holly and privet. For, as Sir Thomas Swaffham said, "Hyde

garden looked just as if brought from Holland;" and especially so in the

spring, when it was ablaze with gorgeous tulips and hyacinths.




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