So it came to pass, I hardly remember how, that in an hour's space our parlour beheld the strangest sight it had beheld since—Ah, no wonder that when she took her place at the table's foot, and gave him his dish of tea with her own hand—her pretty ringed lady's hand—my old father started, as if it had been another than Miss March who was sitting there. No wonder that, more than once, catching the sound of her low, quiet, gentlewomanlike speech, different from any female voices here, he turned round suddenly with a glance, half-scared, half-eager, as if she had been a ghost from the grave.
But Mrs. Jessop engaged him in talk, and, woman-hater as he was, he could not resist the pleasantness of the doctor's little wife. The doctor, too, came in after tea, and the old folk all settled themselves for a cosy chat, taking very little notice of us three.
Miss March sat at a little table near the window, admiring some hyacinths that Mrs. Jessop had brought us. A wise present: for all Norton Bury knew that if Abel Fletcher had a soft place in his heart it was for his garden and his flowers. These were very lovely; in colour and scent delicious to one who had been long ill. John lay looking at them and at her, as if, oblivious of past and future, his whole life were absorbed into that one exquisite hour.
For me—where I sat I do not clearly know, nor probably did any one else.
"There," said Miss March to herself, in a tone of almost childish satisfaction, as she arranged the last hyacinth to her liking.
"They are very beautiful," I heard John's voice answer, with a strange trembling in it. "It is growing too dark to judge of colours; but the scent is delicious, even here."
"I could move the table closer to you."
"Thank you—let me do it—will you sit down?"
She did so, after a very slight hesitation, by John's side. Neither spoke—but sat quietly there, with the sunset light on their two heads, softly touching them both, and then as softly melting away.
"There is a new moon to-night," Miss March remarked, appositely and gravely.