“’Tis May without and May within!” might well have been Sydney’s song, as she literally¹ danced along the Park on a perfect afternoon a few weeks later.
Though she and Miss Osric had been up since seven o’clock, the day had seemed all too short for everything she wanted to crowd into it.
“No one should do the flowers but herself,” she declared, and Mackintosh groaned² over the ravages³ she made in “his conservatories⁴” and “his gardens.” But Miss Lisle was a privileged person in his eyes, so his groans⁵ were only inward, and he actually went so far as to walk round the conservatories with her, cutting what she wanted, with the face of a martyr⁶ at the stake!
“Not that I grudge⁷ flowers in reason to her ladyship,” he explained, “but what’s to
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 become of my flower-show next month, miss, I ask you?”
“Indeed, I won’t take all your flowers,” said Sydney; “but surely, Mackintosh, you want the Castle to be gay as much as I do when Lord St. Quentin is bringing home his bride at last!”
“Well, miss, I’ll not say but that I do rejoice with all my heart,” the old man said. “And a fine upstanding ladyship we shall have, says I! I mind her well enough when she come here first with the Dean, and looked at my flowers for all the world as if they were Christians⁹, and understood what she said to ’em. ‘Oh, you beauties! you lovely things!’ she cried as she comes into the conservatories, as his lordship he was showing to her. No, miss, I don’t grudge my flowers, in reason—not to you or to her ladyship!”
The wedding had taken place very quietly a fortnight ago. Both Katharine and St. Quentin felt that they had waited long enough for the happiness that had so nearly never come at all. They were married early one morning, in one of the little side

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