wider; and she would have been astonished and perhaps disgusted, to
learn that Aunt Rose had once occupied herself with similar dreamings.
But She was spared that knowledge and she was tempted to wait in her
place on the chance that the stranger would return, but, deciding that
it was hardly what a Mallett would do, she rose reluctantly, carrying
the pink orchid in one hand, the less favoured ones in the other.

The evening was exquisite: she saw a pale-blue sky fretted with green
leaves, striped with tree trunks astonishingly black; she heard
steamers threshing through the water and giving out warning whistles,
sounds to stir the heart with the thoughts of voyage, of danger, and
of unknown lands; and as she walked up the long avenue of elms she
found that all the people strolling out after tea for an evening walk
had happy, pleasant faces.

She met fathers and mothers in loitering advance of children, shy
lovers with no words for each other, an old lady in a bath chair
propelled by a man as old, young men in check caps, with flowers in
their coats, earnest people carrying prayer-books and umbrellas, girls
with linked arms and shrill laughter; and she envied none of them: not
the children, finding interest in everything they saw; not the
parents, proud in possession; not the old lady whose work was done,
not the young men and women eyeing each other and letting out their
enticing laughter; she envied no one in the world. She had found an
occupation, and that night, sitting at the dinner-table, she was
conscious of the difference in herself and of a new kinship with these
women, the two who could look back on adventures, rosy and poetic, the
one who seemed shrouded in some delicate mystery. It was as though
she, too, had been initiated; she was surer of herself, even in the
presence of Aunt Rose, with her beauty like that of a white flower,