"O no! I must go home. It is only the heat."
"Not stronger than you used to be, I am afraid."
"I don't know. One learns not to give in so easily."
Harvey Dalrymple made no immediate answer. He was gazing up at the tower, and his next remark was an involuntary— "How it recalls old days!"
"When you were here last?"
"No; farther back. When my mother was living."
"Before I was born."
Though her face might have belonged to any age under thirty, Marjory was only twenty-one.
"Yes; before you were born, and before your father had the living. . . . I have just been recalling childish fancies of mine in those days connected with the big square pew. By-the-bye, that pew is soon to be a thing of the past, isn't it? Hermione writes of projected improvements. There was a certain window just in front, which, imagination, to my infant imagination, was the gate of heaven. Yes, that corner window—ivy all round, just as it used to be." He spoke half lightly, half seriously, adding, in a moved tone, "When my mother was taken, I fully believed that she had gone upward that way, through a path of sunbeams and green leaves."
"Children sometimes see farther than grown people," Marjory asserted gravely.