Before the dew is off the grass they have met. It is presumable that familiarity with her new position will come in time to Peggy; but for the present she cannot get over the extraordinariness of being--instead of anxiously watching for some one else's tardy lover--going to meet her own. And when they have met and greeted, the incredulity, instead of lessening, deepens. Is it conceivable that it can be _her_ whom any one is so extravagantly glad to see? All through the day--all through several after-days--the misty feeling lingers that there must be some mistake; that it must be some one else; that it cannot be the workaday Peggy, whom she has always known, who is being thus unbelievably set on high and done obeisance to. 'Have you told Prue?' asks Talbot, when he has enough got over the ecstasy of that new morning meeting, to speak connectedly. 'Yes.' 'And what did she say?' Margaret hesitates a moment. 'She--she was very much upset.' 'Upset!' repeats Talbot, his tone evidencing the revulsion of feeling of one who had imagined that all Creation must be rejoicing with him. 'What was there in it to upset her?' 'She said it was such a surprise; she was not at all prepared for it. In that,' blushing, 'she was like me.' He is silent. It is a mere speck in his heaven; but he would have liked Prue to have been glad too. 'She said that you are such a stranger,' continues Peggy, looking half-shyly up at him, with a sort of light veil of trouble over her limpid eyes. 'When I come to think of it, so you are; if it were not,' laughing a little, 'that I am always hearing the children call you by it, I should not even know what your Christian name was.' 'A stranger!' repeats Talbot, in a rather dashed voice. 'Never mind; you will not be a stranger long,' returns Peggy, laughing. 'She will soon grow used to you; and so' (again with that flitting blush)--'and so shall I. You must tell me all about yourself,' she goes on, a few moments later, when, in order to escape from the aggressive din that Jacob is making with the mowing-machine, as if to assert his exclusive right to that engine, they have passed beyond the garden bounds into the green sea of the adjoining park. 'You must begin at the very beginning; you must tell me _all_.' Is it his fancy that she lays a slight but perceptible emphasis on that concluding word, which insists on the entirety of his confession? Whether it be so, or that the stress exists only in his own imagination, he winces. They have sat down under a horse-chestnut tree, whose hundreds of blossom-pyramids point like altar tapers to the fleckless sky; at their feet the bracken, so tardy to come, so in haste to go, is beginning to spring and straighten its creases. Far as the eye can reach, the park's green dips and rises are flushed with the rose and cream of flowering thorn-bushes. 'Will you?' with a soft persistency.