“Mr. Winwood—I think—that is—oh, let us go into the house. I never wish to walk in a garden of roses again.”
He knew that whatever she had meant to say when she drew that long breath, she had not said it: she had broken down and uttered something quite different from what had been on her mind—on her lips.
Already she was half way to the terrace steps, and she had run up them and was within the room before he moved.
She was greeting some one in the room. How loud her laugh was!
And yet he had thought half an hour before that he had never heard so low a laugh as hers!—the laughter of a brook among mossy stones.
But a spate had taken place.
He went down once more to the end of the garden alone thinking his thoughts.
And when, five minutes later, he went slowly up the terrace steps he found that Josephine had gone away.
“She said good-bye to you before she left the garden, did she not?” cried Amber, while he glanced round the room.
“Oh, yes, she said good-bye,” he replied.