"Bother the man!" old John Saunders muttered. "He seems afraid to stay with me. A letter for me? Strange—very strange." And he stretched out his hand and took up the envelope.
A faint sense of something familiar stirred within him as he glanced at the handwriting—a something which he could not quite recall out of the past. He opened the envelope and drew out the letter almost rapidly. It was very short.
"Dear John,—I wonder if I may still call you that, after all the years that have gone by? I would not have troubled you with a letter now, but that I heard, only to-day, that you are ill and alone. And I thought I must write to you for auld lang syne, and ask you whether you would let me come and see you. We are both old people now, John; but let me come to see you, for old sake's sake.
"Yours, as ever,
"Joan Bentley.
"P.S.—Did you never get the letter I wrote you more than thirty years ago?"
The letter dropped from his hands. The keen grey eyes grew dim.
It was strange that this should have come just when the remembrance had returned to him of the lime-trees in her father's garden, of the bees that had hummed among them forty years ago.
His dreary room faded from his sight. It was as if the walls melted into space, and he could feel the warm air of July blowing round him, smell the fragrance of the lime-flowers, step upon the softness of the smooth turf beneath his feet.
He was young again! A man with his life before him, and love within his grasp.
He could see the tall hollyhocks by the gate—the hollyhocks she loved. There were tall white lilies there as well. The sweetness of them filled the air, mingling with the scent of roses that clambered up the old red wall. The wood-pigeons cooed gently in the copse across the road, and the rooks cawed as they swung upon the boughs of the lime-trees.