As he greeted her, his gaze plunged deep into hers. She had recoiled a step, startled, to recognize him almost instantly. He noted the shrinking and thought it due to a stabbing memory of that forest-horror. His first words were prosaic enough:

“I’m an unconscionable trespasser,” he said. “It must seem awfully prowly, but I didn’t realize I was on private property till I passed the hedge there.”

As her hand lay in his, a strange fancy stirred in him: in that wood-meeting she had seemed something witch-like, the wilful spirit of the passionate spring herself, mixed of her aerial essences and jungle wildernesses; in this scented dim-lit close she was grave-eyed, subdued, a paler pensive woman of under half-guessed sadnesses and haunting moods. With her answer, however, this gravity seemed to slip from her like a garment. She laughed lightly.

“I love to prowl myself. I think sometimes I like the night better than the day. I believe in one of my incarnations I must have been a panther.”

“Do you know,” he said, “I followed the scent of those roses? I smelled it at Damory Court.”

“It goes for miles when the air is heavy as it is to-night. How terrible it would be if roses were intoxicating like poppies! I get almost tipsy with the odor sometimes, like a cat with catnip.”

They both laughed. “I’m growing superstitious about flowers,” he said. “You know a rose figured in our first meeting. And in our last—”

She shrank momentarily. “The cape jessamines! I shall always think of that when I see them!”

“Ah, forgive me!” he begged. “But when I remember what you did—for me! Oh, I know! But for you, I must have died.”

“But for me you wouldn’t have been bitten. But don’t let’s talk of it.” She shivered suddenly.

“You are cold,” he said. “Isn’t that gown too thin for this night air?”

“No, I often walk here till quite late. Listen!”

The bird song had broken forth again, to be answered this time by a rival’s in a distant thicket. “My nightingale is in good voice.”

“I never heard a nightingale before I came to Virginia. I wonder why it sings only at night.”

“What an odd idea! Why, it sings in the day-time, too.”

“Really? But I suppose it escapes notice in the general chorus. Is it a large bird?”

“No; smaller than a thrush. Only a little bigger than a robin. Its nest is over there in that hedge—a tiny loose cup of dried oak-leaves, lined with hair, and the eggs are olive color. How pretty the hedge looks now, all tangled with firefly sparks!”

“Doesn’t it! Uncle Jefferson calls them ‘lightning-bugs.’”

“The name is much more picturesque. But all the darky sayings are. I heard him telling our butler once, of something, that ‘when de debble heah dat, he gwine sen’ fo’ he smellin’-salts.’ Who else would ever have put it that way? Do you find him and Aunt Daph useful?”

“He has been a godsend,” he said fervently; “and her cooking has taught me to treat her with passionate respect. As Uncle Jefferson says she can ‘put de big pot in de li’l one en mek soup outer de laigs.’ He’s teaching me now about flowers—it’s surprising how many kinds he knows. He’s a walking herbarium.”

“Come and see mine,” she said. “Roses are our specialty—we have to live up to the Rosewood name. But beyond the arbors, are beds and beds of other flowers. See—by this big tree are speedwell and delphinium. The tree is a black-walnut. It’s a dreadful thing to have one as big as that. When you want something that costs a lot of money you go and look at it and wonder which you want most, that particular luxury or the tree. I know a girl who had two in her yard only a little bigger than this, and she went to Europe on them. But so far I’ve always voted for the tree.”

“Perhaps you’ve not been sufficiently tempted.”

“Maybe,” she assented, and in a bar of light from a window, stooped over a glimmering patch to pull him a sprig of bluebells. “The wildings are hard to find,” she said, “so I grow a few here. What ghostly tintings they show in this half-light! My corn-flowers aren’t in bloom yet. Here are wild violets. They are the single ones, you know, the kind two children play cock-fighting with.” She picked two of the blossoms and hooked their heads together. “See, both pull till one rooster’s head drops off.” She bent again and passed her hand lovingly over a mass of starry blooms. “And here are some bluet, the violet roosters’ little pale-blue hens. How does your garden come on?”

“Famously. Uncle Jefferson has shanghaied a half-dozen negro gardeners—from where I can’t imagine—and he’s having the time of his life hectoring over them. He refers to the upper and lower terraces as ‘up- and down-stairs.’ I’ve got seeds, but it will be a long time before they flower.”

“Oh, would you like some slips?” she cried. “Or, better still, I can give you the roses already rooted—Mad Charles and MarÉchal Neil and Cloth of Gold and cabbage and ramblers. We have geraniums and fuchsias, too, and the coral honeysuckle. That’s different from the wild one, you know.”

“You are too good! If you would only advise me where to set them! But I dare say you think me presuming.”

She turned her full face to him. “‘Presuming!’ You’re punishing me now for the dreadful way I talked to you about Damory Court—before I knew who you were. Oh, it was unpardonable! And after the splendid thing you had done—I read about it that same evening—with your money, I mean!”

“No, no!” he protested. “There was nothing splendid about it. It was only pride. You see the Corporation was my father’s great idea—the thing he created and put his soul into—and it was foundering. I know that would have hurt him. One thing I’ve wanted to say to you, ever since the day we talked together—about the duel. I want to say that whatever lay behind it, my father’s whole life was darkened by that event. Now that I can put two and two together, I know that it was the cause of his sadness.”

“Ah, I can believe that,” she replied.

“I think he had only two interests—myself and the Corporation. So you see why I’d rather save that and be a beggar the rest of my natural life. But I’m not a beggar. Damory Court alone is worth—I know it now—a hundred times what I left.”

“But to give up your own world—to let it all slip by, and to come here to a spot that to you must seem desperately dull.”

“I came here because the door of the old life was closed to me.”

“You closed it yourself,” she answered quickly.

“Maybe. But for whatever reason, it was closed. And you call this dull—dull? Why, my life seems never to have had real interest before!”

“I’m so glad you think that! You are so utterly different from what I imagined you!”

“I could never have imagined you,” he said, “never.”

“I must be terribly outrÉ.”

“You are so many women in one. When I listened to your harp playing I could hardly believe it was the same you I saw galloping across the fields that morning. Now you are a different woman from both of those.”

As she looked at him, her lips curled corner-wise, her foot slipped on the sheer edge of the turf. She swayed toward him and he caught her, feeling for a sharp instant the adorable nearness of her body. It ridged all his skin with a creeping delight. She recovered her footing with an exclamation, and turned back somewhat abruptly to the porch where she seated herself on the step, drawing her filmy skirt aside to make a place for him. There was a moment of silence which he broke.

“That exquisite serenade you were playing! You know the words, of course.”

“They are more lovely, if possible, than the score. Do you care for poetry?”

“I’ve always loved it,” he said. “I’ve been reading some lately—a little old-fashioned book I found at Damory Court. It’s Lucile. Do you know it?”

“Yes. It’s my mother’s favorite.”

He drew it from his pocket. “See, I’ve got it here. It’s marked, too.”

He opened it, to close it instantly—not, however, before she had put out her hand and laid it, palm down, on the page. “That rose! Oh, let me have it!”

“Never!” he protested. “Look here. When I put it between the leaves, I did so at random. I didn’t see till now that I had opened it at a marked passage.”

“Let us read it,” she said.

He leaned and held the leaf to the light from the doorway and the two heads bent together over the text.

A sound fell behind them and both turned. A slight figure, in a soft gray gown with old lace at the throat, stood in the doorway behind them. John Valiant sprang to his feet.

“Ah, Shirley, I thought I heard voices. Is that you, Chilly?”

“It’s not Mr. Lusk, mother,” said Shirley. “It’s our new neighbor, Mr. Valiant.”

As he bent over the frail hand, murmuring the conventional words that presentations are believed to require, Mrs. Dandridge sank into a deep cushioned chair. “Won’t you sit down?” she said. He noticed that she did not look directly at him, and that her face was as pallid as her hair.

“Thank you,” said John Valiant, and resumed his place on the lower step.

Shirley, who had again seated herself, suddenly laughed, and pointed to the book which lay between them. “Imagine what we were doing, dearest! We were reading Lucile together.”

She saw the other wince, and the deep dark eyes lifted, as if under compulsion, from the book-cover to Valiant’s face. He was startled by Shirley’s cry and the sudden limp unconscious settling-back into the cushions of the fragile form.