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She received him without any pretence of Mrs. Rock’s intermediary presence, and put before him a letter which she had received, before writing him, from St. John, and which she could not answer without first submitting it to him. It was a sufficiently straightforward expression of his regret that he could not accept her very generous offer for St. Johnswort because the place was already sold. He had the taste to forbear any allusion to the motives which (she told Hewson) she had said prompted her offer; but then he became very darkling and sinuous in a suggestion that if Miss Hernshaw wished to have her offer known as hers to the purchaser of St. Johnswort he would be happy to notify him of it.

“You see,” she eagerly commented to Hewson, “he does not give your name; but I know who it is, though I did not know when I made him my offer. I must answer his letter now, and what shall I say? Shall I tell him I know who it is? I should like to; I hate all concealments! Will it do any harm to tell him I know?”

Hewson reflected. “I don’t see how it can. I was trying to come to you, when I got your note, to say that St. John had been to see me, and offered to release me from my offer, because, as I thought, you had made him a better one. He’s amusingly rapacious, St. John is.”

“And what did you–I beg your pardon!”

“Oh, not at all. I said I would stand to my offer.”

She repressed, apparently, some form of protest, and presently asked, “And what shall I say?”

“Oh, if you like, that you have learned who the purchaser of St. Johnswort is, and that you know he will not give way.”

“Well!” she said, with a quick sigh, as of disappointment. After an indefinite pause, she asked, “Shall you be going to St. Johnswort?”

“Why, I don’t know,” Hewson answered. “I had thought of going to Europe. But, yes, I think I shall go to St. Johnswort, first, at any rate. One can’t simply turn one’s back on a piece of real estate in that way,” he said, recognizing a fact that would doubtless have presented itself in due order for his consideration. “My one notion was to forget it as quickly as possible.”

“I should not think you would want to do that,” said the girl, seriously.

“No, one oughtn’t to neglect an investment.”

“I don’t mean that. But if such a thing had happened to me, there, I should want to go again and again.”

“You mean the apparition? Did I tell you how I had always had the expectation that I should see it again, and perhaps understand it? But when I had behaved so shabbily about it, I began to feel that it would not come again.”

“If I were in your place,” said the girl, “I should never give up; I should spend my whole life trying to find out what it meant.”

“Ah!” he sighed. “I wish you could put yourself in my place.”

“I wish I could,” she returned, intensely.

They looked into each other’s faces.

“Miss Hernshaw,” he demanded, solemnly, “do you really like people to say what they think?”

“Of course I do!”

“Then I wish you would come to St. Johnswort with me!”

“Would that do?” she asked. “If Mrs. Rock–“

He saw how far she was from taking his meaning, but he pushed on. “I don’t want Mrs. Rock. I want you–you alone. Don’t you understand me? I love you. I–of course it’s ridiculous! We’ve only met three or four times in our lives, but I knew this as well the first moment as I do now. I knew it when you came walking across the garden that morning, and I haven’t known it any better since, and I couldn’t in a thousand years. But of course–“

“Sit down,” she said, wafting herself into a chair, and he obeyed her. “I should have to tell my father,” she began.