“Yes, especially here,” he repeated, smiling—so I have no doubt he did remember.

Just then, Lisabel's laugh, and her husband's with it, rang distantly across the pool.

“They seem very happy, those two.”

I said, I felt sure they were, and that it was a blessed thing to find, the older one grew, how very much of happiness there is in life.

“Do you think so?”

“Do you not think so?”

“I do; but not in your sense exactly. Remember, Miss Theodora, people see life in a different aspect at twenty-five and at—”

“Forty. I know that.”

“That I am forty? Which I am not quite, by the bye. No doubt it seems to you a most awful age.”

I said, it was perhaps for a woman, but for a man no more than the prime of life, with many years before him in which both to work and enjoy.