It was all so simple, had he but known, as all great secrets seem when they are once discovered. Your astrologist goes weaving grotesque obscurities about man’s destiny and the stars, till one calm brain sets the whole grand and reasonable scheme in order. Men wrote with prodigious pomposity about a pump. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” quoth they. And Nature, like a misunderstood woman, laughed in her sleeve, knowing that the larger a wise man’s words are, the less he knows. That Lionel Purcell’s death had left a great void in the girl’s life, and that she still brooded over the violent mystery of it, of these things John Gore felt assured. He could put no clear meaning to the mood of yesterday, save that much grieving had left, as it were, an open wound upon the brain, and that memory, touching it, would not suffer it to heal. She had never given him one glimpse of the real purpose that she cherished. Yet probably John Gore’s nag would have leaped forward under a sudden slash of his rider’s spurs had the man been told what Barbara had kept hidden from him in her bosom. As it was, her past life appeared to him suffused with a wistful glow of infinite sadness, infinite regret. Her face rose before him dim with a mist of autumn melancholy. Her crown was a crown of scarlet berries woven and interwoven amid the dark peril of her hair. As for Barbara, she had fallen into a strange mood that day when John Gore rode northward out of her life. She rose early, and walked alone in the garden, showing an untroubled face to her mother when my lady descended after taking breakfast in bed. Barbara, to appear occupied, had a basket on her arm, and a pair of scissors with which she was cutting off the dead flowers along the border. Anne Purcell was a lady who had never bent her back over such a hobby. “Such things were for maiden ladies with round shoulders and no bosoms.” And the mother was a little inquisitive that morning, for John Gore’s face had told her nothing the night before. Her wishes were all for an understanding between the two, and she was not squeamish. The grip of a man’s arm would hug the mopes out of the girl. Barbara needed hot blood to teach her to live and to enjoy. My lady was wise in all these matters. “It is a new thing for you to touch the harpsichord, Barbe,” she said, with that kindness that comes easily when people seemed inclined to shape themselves to one’s wishes. “I will send Rogers to the City and have a man out to tune the wires.” Barbara reached for a dead flower, showing off her figure finely as she leaned over the border—but there was no man there to see. “You can have a singing-master again, if you wish for it, so that you can sing to some one when he comes riding back from the North.” She laughed and looked at her daughter with motherly archness. It was good, at least, to see the girl busying herself even over such things as dead flowers. “My voice is not worth training.”