Left alone, I sighed a little, and looked ahead. They had fallen in love so wholeheartedly, so gaily, those two. I pictured them, if all went well, going through life like the Princess and Prince in the fairy-tale, living "happily forever after." She could love, I knew, that feather-brained, big-hearted little friend of mine. She was young, too, younger than her years, an astonishing thing in Southern women. She would be easily assimilated, would adapt herself gracefully. And it was patent that she thought Wright head and shoulders above the average cut of men. She had told me so, without knowing it, over and over again. And Wright, diffident, sensitive Wright, under his absurdities and his worldly airs? He would cherish her, I knew, and be good to her all his life: invest her with a never-failing glamour, make her his model and his sovereign lady: write madrigals about her: worship at her tiny feet. It was a very pretty little Romance.... They would never have pain in their love, I thought: never know undreamed of depths of agony and self-knowledge: never know secret shrines despoiled, the altars overthrown, desecrated.... I heard Peter's voice in the living room, and Sarah's asking where I was. I called to them and went in. It was strange, I thought, as I discussed with Sarah the preliminaries of packing, how much I seemed to know about Love. I, who had never known, nor felt any save my Father's and that of my few, placid friends ... and perhaps that Love that is all dream-stuff. And in my heart was a voice which questioned and which I dared not answer. "How do you _know_?" it said to me. "_How do you know?_" I closed my ears to it and drew Peter into my lap. "Will you be glad to go home?" I asked him. "Well," said Peter, considering, "there's--Silas." "So there is," I assented. "Couldn't he come with us?" asked Peter, coaxingly. "He could sleep in my room--" I looked at Sarah, for appreciation of this. Lean, long Silas lodging in Peter's small nest. And I looked twice. Sarah, her head bent over an armful of my gowns, was--_blushing_! I couldn't believe my eyes. I might have fancied the Rock of Gibraltar moved to such soft symptoms of complexion, before Sarah. "Why, Sarah!" I said, in amazement. The difficult red crept up to her honest eyes. She raised them and met mine, and what I saw there was very beautiful. I put Peter off my lap. "Run out and play for a while, dear," I said, "before tea." And then, "Sarah?" "He's a good man, Miss Mavis," she answered, clutching the gowns to her, ruinously--my careful Sarah! "And we're neither of us so young, nor so flighty that we wouldn't know our own minds. Mr. Reynolds has written him that he has a buyer for the place, and we thought that when things was settled down here, Silas could come up North to Green Hill--and--" "But, Sarah," I cried out, in childish dismay, "I can't lose you--I can't--" She put the gowns on a nearby chair and touched my hair with her faithful old hand.