Easter has fallen late this year, and so has come with pomp of pear-blossom, with teeming primroses, with garden hyacinth and field daffodil; has come, too, with a breath like June's. The garden-chairs are set out; and on them, just as if it were midsummer, only that above their heads the Judas-tree holds leafless arms, the lovers sit, through the splendour of the lengthening days. Freddy has said many a charming thing about the pear-blossom; about nature's awakening; about the hymeneal birds--things that, as Prue says, are almost poetry just as he speaks them, without any alteration. But he will not be able to say any more to-day, since he lies under one of his mysterious obligations--an obligation which he not darkly hints to have been imposed upon him by his aunt--to dine and sleep at a house in the neighbourhood. 'Milady has ignored them for twenty years,' he says of his intended hosts; 'and now she is sending me out as her dove, with her olive-branch. Of course I could not be so selfish as to refuse her. But,' with a heavy sigh, 'I wish she would carry her olive-branch herself!' 'I wish she would,' replies Prue dejectedly, her small face already overcast at the prospect of twenty-four hours' separation. 'It seems hard that one can never be perfectly well off without there coming some element of change and disintegration,' says Freddy, with a subdued sadness. 'Well, God bless you, darling! Take care of her, Peggy! Take good care of my Prue! Be waiting for me, Prue, at the garden-gate at twelve o'clock to-morrow!' And Prue does wait, is waiting long before the appointed hour; waits--it would be piteous to say for how long after that hour--waits in vain, for Freddy comes not. He does not return all that day; nor is it till late on the next that he comes stepping, cool and smiling, across the evening shadows. 'Do not go to meet him,' says Peggy half crossly; 'he does not deserve it!' But she speaks, as she had known that she would, to inattentive ears. It was, indeed, only as a relief to her own feelings that she had given that futile counsel. It is some time before they rejoin her, and when they do-- 'It was not quite so bad as you expected, I suppose?' Margaret says, a little drily. 'When is anything so bad as one expects?' replies Freddy evasively, throwing himself into his accustomed chair; 'by Jove! how the pear-tree has come out since I left!' 'That was two whole days ago!' says Prue, rather wistfully. 'Two whole days ago!--so it was-- "Measured by opening and by closing flowers!" Prue, do you happen to have a needle about you? No? Of course I do not mean to give you the trouble of going into the house to fetch one; some people have a crop of needles always about them. Oh, Prue!--stop! I am shocked--that is the last thing I meant!' But poor Prue is off like a lapwing. 'You stayed longer than you intended?' says Peggy interrogatively.