As, later, they went together through the little garden, and passed again the rudely-chalked question upon the gate--"Shall I stay here with you, and face the music," Kate Grantley asked, "or will you come away with me to Paris?" "AS 'TWAS TOLD TO ME" Her husband had died suddenly in the third year of their marriage, and she had been left a young widow with their only child. The husband had been dead a year--a year passed in close seclusion in her country home--when she went out on a bright morning of the early spring, taking her little daughter with her, to gather primroses in the plantation bordering one extremity of the park around her house. She had remembered when she arose in the morning that the day was the anniversary of her husband's death. A year only! It had seemed like twenty years. For she was very young, and fairly rich and much admired, and the life she had hitherto led had not prepared her to support loneliness and retirement profitably. The shock of the sudden death had been terrible. She had thought that she should die of it; but she did not even fall ill. And there was the child, whom she adored. And later there had arisen a new interest. The new interest, in the form of Major Harold Walsh, was at her elbow on this kind morning of sweetest spring. He was a middle-aged man, with a handsome, hard face and a very tender manner, and he chose, as some may think inopportunely, the anniversary of the husband's death to make the widow an offer of marriage. The widow reminded him of what had happened on that day a year ago, pointed out that she could not possibly entertain such a proposition so soon, even cried a little when she spoke of her husband. But in no other way did she discourage the tender-mannered major with the hard face. It would have been well-nigh impossible for a man to make an offer of marriage with a child of three years old clinging to her mother's skirts and incessantly babbling in her mother's ear; so the child with her nurse was sent into the interior of the plantation, in search of the lovely primroses said to flourish there, while the two elders wandered with slow steps and down-bent eyes upon the outskirts of the coppice. So they would have been content to wander for hours, perhaps--he begging for assurances that she with an only half-feigned, pretty reluctance gave--but that their agreeable dalliance was cut short by a sufficiently alarming interruption. She did not absolutely dislike him? Liked him--very much, even? That was well. Years hence, if he waited patiently--and he would try, he would try to wait--she might even get to love him a little? Was that asking too much? Well, not just yet, then; he would wait. But he was not to go away unhappy? Not utterly discouraged? He need not, for what had taken place between them, debar himself entirely of the delight of her society, he might--?