Patricia had as yet an hour to spend in Lichfield before her train left.
She passed it in the garden of her own home, where she had first seen
Rudolph Musgrave and he had fought with Pevensey. All that seemed very
long ago.

The dahlia leaves, she noticed, were edged with yellow. She must look to it that the place was more frequently watered; and that the bulbs were dug up in September. Next year she meant to set the dahlias thinly, like a hedge….

"Oh, yes, I meant to. Only I won't be alive next year," she recollected.

She went about the garden to see if Ned had weeded out the wild-pea vines—a pest which had invaded the trim place lately. Only a few of the intruders remained, burnt-out and withered as they are annually by the mid-summer sun. There would be no more fight until next April.

"Oh, and I have prayed to You, I have always tried to do what You wanted, and I never asked You to let me be born locked up in a good-for-nothing Musgrave body! And You won't even let me see a wild-pea vine again! That isn't much to ask, I think. But You won't let me do it. You really do have rather funny notions about Your jokes."

She began to laugh.

"Oh, very well!" Patricia said aloud. "It is none of my affair that You elect to run Your world on an extremely humorous basis."

She was at Matocton in good time for luncheon.