“Please God, you shan’t regret it, sir,” St. Quentin said, as he had said before to Katharine, and the three went toward the Deanery together along the path beside the daffodil-filled border.
“It was little Sydney who sent me here to-day,” St. Quentin said to Katharine, as they stood a moment just inside the low-browed, quaintly-carved stone porch of the old Deanery, looking back on what must be to them for evermore an enchanted garden; “it was she whose faith in love’s endurance sent me here to-day to test it, Katharine. God bless the child for that, and for all!”
And Katharine echoed from her heart, “Yes, God bless her!”
CHAPTER XXVI
A HOME-COMING
“’Tis May without and May within!” might well have been Sydney’s song, as she literally danced along the Park on a perfect afternoon a few weeks later.
Though she and Miss Osric had been up since seven o’clock, the day had seemed all too short for everything she wanted to crowd into it.
“No one should do the flowers but herself,” she declared, and Mackintosh groaned over the ravages she made in “his conservatories” and “his gardens.” But Miss Lisle was a privileged person in his eyes, so his groans were only inward, and he actually went so far as to walk round the conservatories with her, cutting what she wanted, with the face of a martyr at the stake!
“Not that I grudge flowers in reason to her ladyship,” he explained, “but what’s to become of my flower-show next month, miss, I ask you?”