June flowers grew in the grass; a beryl and cinnabar sky crowned and mantled the world. The trees were heavy and big with leaf, grave and gay with a score of greens. Bees hummed to the wild roses. An old apple-tree, late but lusty of blossoms, buffeted and bent by a thousand gales—but its good roots held—lay prone on the ground. Its flowers lay a perfumed white and rose veil heaped on ferns and hare-bells. A baby squirrel sat bolt up on the prostrate gnarled trunk, industriously washing his baby face. The summer air had a score of scents and bore on its fragrant warmth one message. And married birds were teaching their babies to fly. They ought not to have come here—the man and the girl who had grappled their wills to renouncement—not here to this perfumed place of fulfilment. It was here that Sên King-lo had brought his new joy and sorrow one late afternoon in April—had sat an hour where the cleanly squirrel sat now, and had fought his first round in his battle with self. He had made up mind and purpose then in the only way he could. Marriage between him—Chinese—and an English girl, even if he could win her to it, which he believed he could not—must not be; should not. And from that he never had wavered, did not waver now. He had thought it all out bit by bit and had made his paramount resolve, and little by little the plan of his nearer days. Since he might not ask what he most craved, he would hold but the faster, while he might, to what he already had: friendship and sweet welling companionship. He never could marry; it was written; and because it was, he would garner every dear memory he could to comfort his years. But again and again the dream came of an English Ruby sitting in firelight and garden—_his_ firelight, _his_ garden—while his eyes played with her hair. He knew it a dream. He would not, if he could, have it a fact. But he knew he would keep it forever and dream it again and again while his years lasted. Take it home with him some day and dream it again when he sat a childless old man on the banks of the Yellow Sorrow. They ought not to have come here or lingered. Sên King-lo knew his own strength; but, Chinese though he was, he did not know Nature’s. “What a ripping old hero,” he said, pointing down to the prostrate tree, “game to the last.” He gathered her a spray of the rosy apple-blossoms and buds and filched for his coat another. “We must come here—in September. The apples that grow on so brave a tree should be good—full of tang, like wine. We’ll eat them in September. It’s a bargain?” “But I am going home in August,” she told him and added lightly, though her lips felt stiff, “Didn’t you know?” Sên King-lo gave a cry. Their eyes met. There was neither China nor England—nor Virginia. There was only a man and a girl—and Nature: in all the world nothing else. “You must not go—from me,” he said. “I cannot live without you. You are my life.” He held his arms out to her with a gesture that pleaded—but claimed.