"Does it worry you--my keeping on pointing out things?" she asked
at last.
"Worry? Lord, no! Shout as much as you like. It reminds me of when
I was a kid, coming back from Harrow to Apsley for the holidays."
When they came in sight of the Manor, could perceive through rents
in the cloak of cedars that enveloped it, the high, graceful
Elizabethan chimneys and the points of the red gables on which the
starlings congregated, Traill half rose to his feet with a straining
of his neck--a light of excitement in his eyes.
"There it is!" he exclaimed. "That place through the dark trees there.
Jove, I haven't seen it for more than three years."
She followed the direction in which his extended finger pointed, and
her eyes took in, not only Apsley, but his life and the true gulf
that lay between them. As she saw it from there, she recognized it
as a place which, passing, even in those better days when her father
had lived in the quaint little rectory at Cailsham, she might have
exclaimed--"Oh, what a lovely place that is! I wonder who lives
there?" And it had belonged to him--this man who had taken her life
out of its dreary groove and placed it in a pleasure-garden of plenty;
but the garden gate was not locked and the key was not in her keeping.
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