A Fountain Sealed

d neighbor since the news of her bereavement had reached her, and now, rising to meet him, a consciousness of all that had

throughout his garments with a pleasing harmony, so that in his rough tweeds and riding-gaiters he seemed as much a product of the nature outside as any bird or beast. The air of a delightfully civilized rurality was upon him, an air of landowning, law-dispensing, sporting efficiency; and if, in the fitne

ed by repeating a good many times that he hoped she wasn't too frightfully pulled down. Mrs. Upton said that she was really feeling very well, though con

oks this autumnal quietness, too, had brought its gift, discreet, delicate, a whispered sentence, as it were, that one could only listen to blindfolded, but that, once heard, gave one the knowledge of a hidden treasure. Sir Basil had been one of the reasons, the greatest reason, for her happiness in the Surrey nest. It was since coming there to live that she had grown to know him so well, with the slow-developing, deep-rooted intimacy of country life. The meadows and parks of Thremdon Hall encompassed all about the heath where Valerie Upton's cottage stood among its trees. They were Sir Basil's woods that ran down to her garden walls and Sir Basil's lanes that, at the back of the cottage, led up, through the heather, to the little village, a mile or s

tset of life's walk, and who must make the best of a hop-skip-and-jump gait for the rest of it. She had felt, when she decided that she had a right to live away from Everard, that she had no right to ask more of fortune than that escape, that freedom. One paid for such freedom by limiting one's possibilities, and she had never hesitated to pay. Never to indulge herself in sentimental repinings or in sentimental musings, never to indulge others in sentimental relationships, had been the most obvious sort of payment; and if, in regard to Sir Basil, the payment had sometimes been difficult, the reward had been that sense of unblemished peace, that sense of composure and gaiety. It was enough to know, as a justification of her success, that she made him happy, not unhappy. It was enough to know that

t as a strange, unreal tribute to trivial circumstance that, without delay, she should not lean her head against the dear oak and tell it, at last, that its shelter was all that she asked of life. It was necessary to banish the vision by the firm turning to that other, that dark one, o

d, when she told him that she expected her boy in a fe

fore very long, she hoped. So

live with you

leave America," said Valerie. "I do

as though for evidences of the assertion, at the intimate comforts

home, now,

to put aside reflection as, after all,

c smile. "I've not been there for twenty years, you know. I'l

me was needed, she knew, to give him his right of walking over it, and her right-but that was one of the visions she must not look at. A great many things lay between now and then, confused, anxious, perhaps painful, things. The fig

elt it from what you've told me," he said, defining for

, I t

ic. I'm afraid she'll fi

and up for

adding, "but Imogen is v

se standing about the room and he get up to look at them, one after the other-Imogen in eveni

ented. "She would take one in at a great rate; no

to Imogen. And her great point, I thin

hem usefu

ves-to the wor

them, do

that was more it. She lik

ge it?" Sir Basil queried over the photogra

little at his pertinacity. "I've

-table and suggesting that Mrs. Upton should take a little walk with him. His horse had been put into the stable and he could come back for him. Mrs. Upton said that when they came back he must stay to lunch and that be could rid

sand that intersected the common. The day was clear, with a milky, blue-stre

woods, the swift, awkward flight of a pheasant that crossed their way with a creaking whir of wings, the amethyst stars of a bush of Michaelmas daisies, showing over a whitewashed cottage wall, the far blue distance before them, framed in the tracery of the beech-boughs. He knew that she loved it all from the way she looked at it and, almost indignantly, as though against some foolish threat, he felt himself asseverating, "It is her home-she knows it-the place she loves like that." And when they had made thei

hine hills, not the beech-woods, not the heathery common, not even the dear cottage, that she could not bear to leave for good. But since this couldn't be said, s