And while in the rainy, dreary London twilight Lady Capel was dying, Katherine was in the garden at Hyde Manor, watching the planting of seeds that were in a few weeks to be living things of beauty and sweetness. It had ceased raining at noon in Norfolk, and the gravel walks were perfectly dry, and the air full of the fragrance of innumerable violets. All the level land was wearing buttercups. Full of secrets, of fluttering wings, and building nests were the trees. In the apple-blooms the bees were humming, delirious with delight. From the beehives came the peculiar and exquisite odour of virgin wax. Somewhere near, also, the gurgle of running water spread an air of freshness all around. [Illustration: She was stretched upon a sofa] And Katherine, with a little basket full of flower-seeds, was going with the gardener from bed to bed, watching him plant them. No one who had seen her in the childlike loveliness of her early girlhood could have imagined the splendour of her matured beauty. She had grown "divinely tall," and the exercise of undisputed authority had added a gracious stateliness of manner. Her complexion was wonderful, her large blue eyes shining with tender lights, her face full of sympathetic revelations. Above all, she had that nameless charm which comes from a freedom from all anxious thought for the morrow; that charm of which the sweet secret is generally lost after the twentieth summer. Her basket of seeds was clasped to her side within the hollow of her left arm, and with her right hand she lifted a long petticoat of quilted blue satin. Above this garment she wore a gown of wood-coloured taffeta, sprigged with rose-buds, and a stomacher of fine lace to match the deep rufflings on her elbow-sleeves. Little Joris was with his mother, running hither and thither, as his eager spirits led him: now pausing to watch her drop from her white fingers the precious seed into its prepared bed, anon darting after some fancied joy among the pyramidal yews, and dusky treillages, and cradle walks of holly and privet. For, as Sir Thomas Swaffham said, "Hyde garden looked just as if brought from Holland;" and especially so in the spring, when it was ablaze with gorgeous tulips and hyacinths. She had heard much of Lady Capel, and she had a certain tenderness for the old woman who loved her husband so truly; but no thought of her entered into Katherine's mind that calm evening hour. Neither had she any presentiment of sorrow. Her soul was happy and untroubled, and she lingered in the sweet place until the tender touch of gray twilight was over fen and field. Then her maid, with a manner full of pleasant excitement, came to her, and said,-- "Here be a London pedler, madam; and he do have all the latest fashions, and the news of the king and the Americans."