"I'm afraid you'll find it very quiet here, my boy. You see, we've not marked the tennis lawn this summer--Teddie always did that, and there's no young people call now, they're all away. So you'll have to amuse yourself." He went indoors, sadly, thought John. Mrs. Marsh watched him go. "Poor father," she said at last. "It has hurt him terribly." John turned to her. "And you?" he asked quietly. She smiled at him. "Perhaps I am less rebellious, John--I don't know. But I feel, always I have felt, he has not gone, Teddie's here all the time." "Here?" "Yes--in this garden. Sometimes I sit here in the afternoon with my sewing and listen to the wind in these trees. Sometimes there's not a murmur of sound, and yet I feel that Teddie's here, just behind my chair, or pulling the lawn roller down there, or lying in the sun with a cushion under his head, 'basking' as he called it. I'm not what you call psychic, John,--I've never given any thought to these things, but I know he is not dead, that he moves with us here, perhaps hears all we say. You know how he loved to talk. This is foolish, perhaps,--but oh John, I am so sure I am right!" He said nothing, but sat beside her. It was beautiful in this old vicarage garden. Generations of vicars had tended it, and June came year by year, with its profusion of roses, its climbing honeysuckle and night-scented verbena. Was it too much to believe that any one who had loved this spot, whose boyhood had passed in its peace, whose love still lingered here, should come back, unseen? This was a thought of faith, of love that would not countenance surrender; was it a thought any the less reasonable because it sprang from abiding love? He was a child in such experience, it was not for him to judge; happy for her if Faith's bright star shone in the darkness of these days. He did not speak, he could not; any words of his would have seemed desecration. He just sat there by her side, in the flower-scented glow of the garden, while the sun dropped to the horizon and the shadow of the elms lengthened along the lawn. The birds were now twittering before sleep overtook them; the rookery over by the hall grew noisy as the sky changed from rose-red to translucent green, with an adventurous star here and there in the silver grey of the east. The dinner bell tolled at the Hall. Mrs. Marsh broke the silence. "There, it is time we dressed. I have given you Teddie's room, I thought you would like it," she said. Under the pergola they paused and looked back over the gardens towards the yew hedge, behind which the fading light of the horizon flamed in the heart of the sunset. Softly she repeated, "_Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns And the round ocean and the living air._" "Oh, John, I know I am right--the living air! I can't think of Teddie as dead, he loved life too much for that; he was too joyous to end in mere nothingness."