"Reply for us, Kate," whispered Loftus. "Reply for us all, quickly."

"Yes--we'll come," called Catherine across the water.

Beatrice smiled. Her smile was of the sunniest. It flashed back a look
of almost love at Catherine. Then she turned to walk up the steep steps
which led from the quay to the little High Street.

"We ought not to go," instantly began Catherine.

Loftus stopped rowing, bent forward and put his hand across her mouth.

"Not another word," he said. "I'll undertake to conciliate the mother,
and I think she can trust to my ideas of good-breeding."

Meanwhile Beatrice walked quickly home. The Meadowsweets lived at the
far end of the town in a large gray stone house. The house stood back a
little from the road, and a great elm tree threw its protecting shade
over the porch and upper windows. It was, however, an ordinary house in
a street, and looked a little old-fashioned and a little gloomy until
you stepped into the drawing-room, which was furnished certainly with no
pretension to modern taste or art, but opened with French windows into a
glorious, big, old-world garden.

The house was known by the name of the Gray House, and the old garden as
the Gray Garden, but the garden at least bore no resemblance to its
neutral-tinted name. It had green alleys, and sheltering trees, and a
great expanse of smoothly kept lawn. It possessed flower-beds and flower
borders innumerable. There was more than one bower composed entirely of