The old botanist was sitting in his study. It was a wide, cleared room with a table as chaotic as that had been at Les Pins, set, as at Les Pins, before a window; but the view here was not of a lagoon with a belt of dunes and a lighthouse. It showed the roofs of Liverpool.
Professor Howel-Jones had just returned, after various wanderings, to find a big mail awaiting him. He sighed, as he opened the letters, for his little niece and secretary. (Olwen had not been replaced.)
Then he knit his brows over the letter in his hand.
It said:
"Dear Sir,
"The writer of this letter has reproached himself more than once over the rather stupid practical joke that he elected to play upon a man of your attainments by sending to you what was alleged to be the discovery of a love-germ, or Disturbing Charm——"
"Dear me! What and when was that?" pondered the Professor. "Ah, yes. I have it. Some lunatic that wrote to me in France. Something about 'half the trouble in the world arising from people falling in Love—with the wrong people.' Yes, yes. And what was this 'Charm' supposed to do?... Ah, it says now that the Charm was spoof...." He went on reading the letter; the belated apology of some pupil at some University where he had once lectured....
He took it in, half thinking of the next letter as he read....
Fern seed, it appeared, was all that the "magic" packet had contained....
The Professor scarcely remembered that there had been a packet! What had he done with it now, and with the letter? Burnt them, he thought, before that little Olwen got hold of that nonsense....
It would have been just like a very young, imaginative girl like that to have believed in it!
Well, this last letter would have to shatter that belief! thought her Uncle, as he crumpled the practical joker's apology into a ball and tossed it on to the fire.
At the moment when her Uncle's thoughts were turning to her, his niece, young Mrs. Ross, was watching rather a pretty scene.
She stood at the window of her husband's rooms in Victoria Street, his old bachelor rooms into which she had brought the new element of her girlish belongings, her love, herself....
Behind her on the table, above a pile of his books on "Reconstruction," there trailed a dainty litter of her sewing: the lacy whiteness of a garment that was being reconstructed, feminine-fashion, into some other garment.
Beside her stood another war-bride of but a few more weeks' standing, young Mrs. Awdas.
Both of them were looking down into the street, where a crowd lined the pavement to right and left, waiting, watching to see a company of American soldiers march past on their way to Victoria Station.