And so the old affectionate, familiar intercourse was resumed, and May was welcomed in the old way. The Canon missed his daughter, and had not consented easily to her prolonged absence. He liked to see young faces around him; and May's face was particularly pleasant to him. At first May had refused to leave her grandmother. But Mrs. Dobbs urged her to spend some hours every day with the Hadlows. "I have my own occupations in the daytime," she said; "and when you come home of an evening, and tell me all your sayings and doings, I can enjoy it comfortably. I don't want you hanging about this poky little place all day, my lass." The girl was the more easily persuaded to do as her grandmother wished in this matter from her own secret resolve to fix herself in Oldchester. She did not grudge the hours given to her friends. There would be plenty more time to be spent with granny. So she thought; reckoning on the morrow with the assurance of youth. Day after day she sat during the hot afternoon hours under the black shadow of the old yew tree in the Canon's garden; sometimes volunteering to do some task of needlework for Mrs. Hadlow, sometimes winding wool for the Canon's grey socks, sometimes making up posies for the adornment of the sitting-room. And there was Fox, the terrier, dividing his attentions between her and his mistress; the peaceful Wend flowing by on the other side of the hedge; the garden blooming, the birds twittering, the distant schoolboys shouting, the sweet cathedral bells chiming,--everything as it had been last summer. And yet not quite as it had been. There was some subtle difference between these afternoons and the afternoons of last summer. It was not merely that Constance was missed, nor that Theodore Bransby no longer made one of the group beneath the yew tree. Of these changes one was scarcely to be regretted--for Conny was enjoying herself extremely, and only desired to prolong her leave of absence--and the other was undoubtedly satisfactory. But this could not surely suffice to make it a deep delight to sit silent and wind balls of gray worsted for half an hour at a stretch! Was it the negative joy of Theodore's absence which caused May to look forward with her first waking thoughts to those hours in the garden, and to live them over again in her mind when she lay down to rest at night? It seemed as if the London season, far from spoiling her for simple things, had marvellously enhanced the quiet pleasures of her home life, and given them a new intensity.