Gone--and there had never been anybody but me! Ah, Peggy, there had need be _Someone_ that knows, to make good the pity of it, the cruelty of it, the senseless waste of it! But we three, whom she gave so generously to each other, whom, in turn, she tended back to life, into whose lives she has grown as a tree grows, can we call her love wasted? Nor is it among us alone that her memory flourishes. No woman in all those mountain parishes she loved so well faces her dark hour of travail without blessing her name and the name of her messengers, whom, in the endowment called in memorial of her, Margarita sends to them, to tend them and the children they bear, as Harriet helped her and hers. She lies among them, a stone's throw from the corner-stone she laid nearly twenty years ago, now, and many visitors have never seen the tablet that lies along her grave--so thick the flowers are always lying there. "Mother says you are not to look so sad, Jerry dear, because it isn't me that Freddy's marrying!" says Peggy softly, behind me, and I come back to the present, with a jerk. "Not Freddy, perhaps," I answer with pretended severity, "but some other young sprig no better than Freddy, and then poor old Jerry may go hang!" She slips her firm little hand--Margarita's hand--into mine shyly. "Now, Jerry, how silly you are!" she says, looking carefully to see if I am teasing her or by any chance in earnest. "How can I marry a young sprig, when I am going to marry you?" "Since when?" I inquire sardonically. "Why, Jerry!" Her big eyes open wide, she plants herself before me and stares accusingly. "You know very well--you can't have forgotten? You and I and little Jerry and Miss Jencks are going round the world when I am sixteen! To Japan, and see the wistaria and the cherry blossoms and the five hundred little stone Buddha-gods that get all wet with spray and the red bridge nobody may walk on!" "Anywhere else?" "Yes, to Vevay and see where Mr. Boffin used to live and old Joseph that told you when you were all grown big and went back, "_C'est moi, Monsieur, qui suis Joseph: j' ai nettoye les premieres bottes de Monsieur!_" How well I remember those first formidable boots, and my manly feelings when I clumped them down in the hall before my door for Joseph to clean! Jerry and Peggy and I are going over every foot of the old grounds--the school, where the little fellows still sport their comfortable, round capes; the way, well trodden still, I'll wager, to the old _patisserie_ with its tempting windows of indigestible joys; the natatorium where we dived like frogs; the English church where we learned the Collects and eyed the young ladies' school gravely till it blushed individually and collectively; the famous field where I fought the grocer's boy who cried "_a bas les Anglais!_" three days running. (He beat me, incidentally.)