"'Love knows the secret of grief.' But can Love claim that knowledge if he is asked how he came by it by one who should have known ?" The question crept in between the friends and moved them apart.

Hester's voice altered.
"Minna would say that I picked them up from the conversation of James.
You know the Pratts are perfectly aware of what I have, of course, tried to conceal, namely, that the love-scenes in the _Idyll_ were put together from scraps I had collected of James's engagement to Minna.

And all the humorous bits are claimed by a colony of cousins in Devonshire who say that any one 'who had heard them talk' could have written the _Idyll._ And any one who had not heard them apparently.

The so-called profane passages are all that are left to me as my own." "You are profane now," said Rachel, smiling, but secretly wounded by the flippancy which she had brought upon herself.
A distant whoop distracted their attention, and they saw Regie galloping towards them, imitating a charger, while Fraeulein and the two little girls followed.
Regie stopped short before Rachel, and looked suspiciously at her.
"Where is Uncle Dick ?" he said.
"I don't know," said Rachel, reddening, in spite of herself, and her eyes falling guiltily before her questioner.
"Then he has not come with you ?" Regie's mind was what his father called "sure and steady." Mr.Gresley often said he preferred a child of that kind to one that was quick-witted and flashy.
"No, he has not come with me." "Mary!" shrieked Regie, "he has not come." "I knew he had not," said Mary.

"When I saw he was not there I knew he was somewhere else." Dear little Mary was naturally the Gresleys' favorite child.