people anxious to give him what one of the little girls
had called "a grand send-off."

Rose saw that there was a moment of confusion, of
hesitation at the gate, and she divined that it was
Jervis who suggested that they should take the rather
longer way round, that which led under the elm trees
and past the Cathedral. He did not wish to pass close
by the Trellis House.

The girl standing by the window felt a sudden rush
of understanding tenderness. How strangely, how
wonderfully their minds worked the one in with the
other! It would have been as intolerable to her as to
him, to have seen her mother run out and stop the
little party -- to have been perchance summoned from
upstairs "to wish good luck to Jervis Blake."

From where she stood Rose Otway commanded the
whole Close, and during the minutes which followed
she saw the group of people walking with quick, steady
steps, stopped by passers-by three or four times, before
they disappeared out of her sight.

It had seemed to her, but that might have been
only her fancy, that the pace, obviously set by Jervis,
quickened rather as they swept past the little gate
through which he and she had gone on their way to
the porch, on their way to -- to Paradise.

Half-way through the morning there came an uncertain
knock at the front door of the Trellis House.
It presaged a note brought by one of the young
Robeys for Mrs. Otway -- a note written by Jervis
Blake, telling her of his good fortune, and explaining
that he had not time to come and thank her in person
for all her many kindnesses to him. One sentence

[[121]]

p120 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p121w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p122

v?