"Don't sit in that chair, Mrs. Winchester," Carolina heard Miss Sallie's voice say, as she ran down the steps into the garden. "That chair has no seat to it, and the back is broken to this one. Sit in this chair. I think it won't be too damp here to wait for Moultrie."
The girl could smile now, for the witchery of the evening was on the garden, and its perfume enthralled her senses. She walked until she got beyond the sound of voices on the front porch, and, at the head of a set of shallow terraces, set like grassy steps to lead down to the brook which babbled through the lower meadow, she sat down to let her mind take in the sudden change in her life.
She rested her chin on her hands and was quite unaware that, in her thin blue dress, with frills of yellow lace falling away from the arms above the elbows, and with her neck rising from the transparent stuff like an iris on its slender stem, she made anything of a picture, until she became aware that some one was standing quite still on a lower terrace and looking at her with so fixed an expression that she turned until her eyes met his. Most girls would have started with surprise, but to Carolina it was no surprise at all to find the stranger of the Metropolitan Opera and the stranger who had borrowed her brother's dog-cart, a part of the enchanted garden, and to feel in her own heart that he was no stranger to her, nor ever had been, nor ever could be.
They looked at each other for a few moments, the man and the woman, and the sound of the brook came faintly to their ears. But the scent of the garden was all about them and there was no need of speech.
Slowly Carolina smiled, and he reached up his hand to hers and took it and said:
"You know me?" and she said:
"Yes."
"And I know you," he said, "for I have felt ever since that first night that you would come."
"That first night?" she breathed.
"At the opera," he said.