“They are very glad,” said Sydney, “and oh, Hugh, I wonder whether anybody on the whole estate is more glad than I am!”
And then Hugh turned and caught her hands and said, with an odd break in his voice, “Syd, are you really?”
She looked straight up at him, and he knew that she had spoken truth.
“If you are, what must I be!” he cried. “My darling, you don’t know, you can’t know what this means to me!”
His voice broke suddenly.
“Tell me,” she said. But I think she understood without telling.
Later, as the two sat together on the grassy bank bordering the bowling green, the girl said, “Do you know, I think we ought to be grateful to St. Quentin for taking me away from home and all of you. It was very, very hard to give up my brother Hugh, but this is better!”
“It is,” Hugh said, with absolute conviction.
“Pang—pang-pang-pang—pang-pang-pang-pang!” went the bells, tripping one another up in their haste to clang out the glad tidings of the birth of an heir male to the great St. Quentin title and estates.
But Sydney had come, in those few quiet minutes in the garden, into a far greater heritage than that of which the little heir’s birth had deprived her!