It was natural enough that for the next ten days the Groom of the Chambers at Chancery should reconstruct Spring’s visit with a grateful heart. Her precious figure preceded him up the stairs, set a slight knee on this settle, stooped to observe those volumes: her laughter rang in the gallery, her voice fluted in the hall, her smile flashed in that doorway: her sympathy, grace, charm were lighting his memory with a glow which he found very valuable. In a word, the lady had wrought havoc. She had shown Willoughby Bagot something from which, for the last lean years, he had rigidly averted his gaze—the loneliness of his existence. With her little, firm hands she had rammed the truth down his throat. Had her mouth been less scarlet, had her throat been less white, her form less beautiful, the light in her eyes less tender, had the maid been less startlingly attractive in word and look and deed, it might have gone less hard with the Groom of the Chambers. Bagot could steel his heart with most men. His job was to cherish Chancery, at any cost. It had not been pleasant to play the servant in his own home; at the best, it had been a bitter-sweet business. Still, keeping his eyes upon the ground, he had become used to his monkhood—perceiving many things for which he had come to thank God. And now . . . They had walked in Chancery together, he and she, walked and talked familiarly in his own home. It was no more his home, in point of fact, than it was hers. And yet—it might have been his and hers, if she pleased, too, but for ill fortune. That way lay madness, of course. Yet—the place suited her. Chancery was so immemorial that it had become natural: its furniture, tapestries, casements seemed to have grown where they hung: labelling age had stolen upon it, as lichen steals upon old tiles, till the spirit of the artifice that garnished had disappeared, and the house ranked with the oaks Gray Bagot had planted ere Richard was king. And Spring was natural. For all her badges of modernity—bead bag, silk stockings, nail polish, she was as refreshingly natural as Pomona herself. She fitted into Chancery as had no maid or man—except his father—whom Willoughby had ever seen treading those stairs. When, therefore, some ten days later, the Groom of the Chambers approached his lodge at a quarter to five o’clock of a July afternoon, to see Spring seated upon the turf beneath his window, hatless, smoking a cigarette and talking earnestly with the old groom, he could have burst into song. Spring picked up her hat and waved, and, when he came up, stretched out her little hands to be helped to her feet. “I said I should come,” she said simply. “You shouldn’t have asked me.” “If I remember,” said Willoughby, “I didn’t so far presume.” Spring raised her brown eyes to heaven. “Which means I’ve come uninvited?” Willoughby bowed. “Queens are not asked for favours,” he said. “Yet they bestow them.”