No, no, it wouldn’t be like that at all. He would want Bella to be the first to know. The next ring at the door would be a telegram for her. Or no, he would hardly want to break so long a silence in that brusque way. No, he would write her a beautiful long letter—telling her—explaining— No! Far more like him just to appear. Without writing—without telegraphing. Just take the swiftest steamer across the Atlantic, and the fastest train across the Continent, and some evening like this, she, little thinking it the hour that should bring such grace, she would lift up her eyes and there he would be!—standing before her. Not only without a long explanatory letter, without words, her face would be hidden in his breast. “There!” Mrs. Mar interrupted an alternative soliloquy of Don Carlos, and Bella started. “They’re early! There are the boys, now!” “I don’t hear them.” But as Hildegarde spoke the words she was conscious of steps on the graveled path, that wound its rather foolish way round this side of the house, leading nowhere. No one ever walked there but Hildegarde herself, cutting or tending flowers. She glanced at Bella, and saw in the wide hazel eyes a light she knew. On the step came crunching gravel. Bella’s needle arrested half through a stitch, and all Bella’s face saying, “John! John Galbraith!”—and only Hildegarde, through her eyes, hearing. But even Mrs. Mar was under some spell of silence and strained expectation. Now the firm tread paused, and there—there, in front of the low uncurtained window, above the syringas, showed the head and shoulders of a man. Not Trenn, not Harry. Who? Hildegarde held her breath. CHAPTER XII “Was it—_could_ it be?” Bella asked mutely, with wildly beating heart. Hildegarde, too, was wide-eyed and pale, though even in the dusk, plain to see the vigorous upstanding figure was not a bent old man’s. Bella felt the happy blood come flooding back about her heart; only to ebb again with a suddenness so mighty, that it seemed to withdraw from her, not gladness only, but volition and all feeling—seemed to want to carry out life itself upon its backward tide. For the man had trodden down the flowers in the border, and pushed his way through the syringa thicket. He stood at the open window, looking in. “Well, Mr. Louis Cheviot,” said Mrs. Mar, with an affectation of calmness, “where did _you_ drop from?” And then Hildegarde’s helmeted figure rose up like some spirit of woman out of another time. But she stood quite still, and she looked as if she knew she was dreaming. Cheviot vaulted over the low sill, and came toward her with eyes of wonder. “What’s all this for? Why are you like that?”—but he had grasped her hand. “That absurd thing on her head? It was to show the boys,” explained Mrs. Mar. “A ball—” “Are you _sure_ you are you?” Hildegarde found her voice at last.