He was sweet to me then, and took away my four little wet handkerchiefs and gave me his big dry one, and gathered me in his arms and said,— ’We can’t have two rows in one family, Meg. Tell me about it, darling.’ So I told him. ’Oh, Meg,’ he said when I had done, ’so love, that very perfect thing, has really come to you, my little girl, but, oh, why do you choose a man who will want to take you away to India, my darling?’ And then father made one of those strange remarks that he does sometimes which I can’t understand. ’My harness piece by piece He has hewn from me.’ ’What _do_ you mean, daddy.’ ’Perhaps I’ll tell you some day, little ’un,’ and he sighed and kissed me and said he would at any rate see Michael in the morning. So I felt more cheered. As he got up to go I thought how wonderful it is to love, so I said,— ’Daddy, what is it that makes me now understand all the lovers of the world? Jacob and Rachel, Elizabeth and Robert, even Dante——’ ’Why, experience, darling,’ father said, and came back and kissed me again, smiling with faint amusement. When he’d gone I turned down the lamp and peeped out of the window and saw that it was moonlight. All the flowers I love so in the day-time were still waiting in the garden—waiting for Michael. In the bright moonlight I could see all sorts of funny things that I have never seen before. There was a little elf in the laburnum tree making yellow tassels, another was stamping out stars from a bit of cloud and throwing them on to the clematis, and a third was taking off the bracken’s curl papers. Just as I was thinking I had better try to go to sleep, I saw a little old woman with a face like a rosy, wrinkled apple walking down the garden path. She was in a great hurry and rather cross.