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124 meeting with the men and women you think heroic, having your ups and downs certainly, but also your rewards and pleasantnesses? I did when I was your age."

"And why should I not?" I ask, puzzled. "Are all our hopes of future happiness illusions? I should hate to think that."

"Do not think it then," he says, standing up with a quick, impatient shake of the shoulders; "let us go out into the garden. By the way, what am I to call you, little madam?"

"Helen Adair," I say, laughing; "at home they call me Nell."

"Then I shall call you Nell, too," he says promptly. "I wonder where my uncle is?"

He goes to a door leading into a smaller inner room, that is, I think, Mr. Frere's study, but he is not there.

"Sent for to some old woman who thinks she is dying, I suppose," says his nephew. "He is always being imposed upon."

We go out into the kitchen garden, which is not close locked as ours at home, but open to all comers; and since there are no little thieves here to make busy work among the fruit, there is plenty and to spare.

"You are as good as a pair of steps," I say, watching him with much interest gathering the pears that grow on the sunny side of the wall; "how useful you would have been at Silverbridge!" He gives me a satin smooth Marie Louise. How I wish Jack was here!

"And of what use should I have been?"

"You could have jumped the wall and thrown the fruit over to us."

"And supposing it was breakable?"

"We should not have minded," I say, laughing. "Have you a first-rate kitchen garden at The Towers?"

"We used to have; I don't know whether the raspberry and gooseberry bushes have grown, like me, aged."