“What have you been doing all this long time?”
“Writing to Noel,” she answered. “Have I neglected you?”
“I was beginning to think so. Come and take a walk round the garden with me.”
“Where is Miss McPherson?”
“She’s perpetrating one of her atrocious and painstaking water colors in the lane.”
“And you tell her they are beautiful!”
“It’s the only way I can make her blush.”
They walked between herbaceous borders where dying colors burned with the deep, concentrated brilliance of embers.
“I have never loved an autumn as I have loved this one,” Stephen said.
“Nor I. Do you know why that is, Stephen? It’s because we are untroubled by thoughts of other autumns.”