No More Learning

Suddenly he saw this sentence: 'Heigho! your poor Margaret is falling
in love again; condole with her, my dear. '

He started. The name 'Margaret,' the mention of Miss Sims, the style
of the whole letter, all made plain the authorship. Very desperately
ashamed of himself, he got up and tore each scrap of paper into still
smaller fragments and scattered them far apart.

That evening he proposed and was accepted.


VI

For several days there was a new heaven and a new earth. Miss Leland
seemed suddenly impressed with the seriousness of life. She was
gentleness itself; and as Sherman sat on Sunday mornings in his
pocket-handkerchief of a garden under the one tree, with its smoky
stem, watching the little circles of sunlight falling from the leaves
like a shower of new sovereigns, he gazed at them with a longer and
keener joy than heretofore--a new heaven and a new earth, surely!

Sherman planted and dug and raked this pocket-handkerchief of a garden
most diligently, rooting out the docks and dandelions and mouse-ear and
the patches of untimely grass. It was the point of contact between his
new life and the old. It was far too small and unfertile and shaded-in
to satisfy his love of gardener's experiments and early vegetables.
Perforce this husbandry was too little complex for his affections to
gather much round plant and bed. His garden in Ballah used to touch him
like the growth of a young family. Now he was content to satisfy his
barbaric sense of colour; right round were planted alternate hollyhock
and sunflower, and behind them scarlet-runners showed their inch-high
cloven shoots.
One Sunday it occurred to him to write to his friends on the matter
of his engagement. He numbered them over. Howard, one or two less
intimate, and Mary Carton. At that name he paused; he would not write
just yet.


VII

One Saturday there was a tennis party. Miss Leland devoted herself all
day to a young Foreign Office clerk. She played tennis with him, talked
with him, drank lemonade with him, had neither thoughts nor words for
anyone else. John Sherman was quite happy. Tennis was always a bore,
and now he was not called upon to play. It had not struck him there was
occasion for jealousy.

As the guests were dispersing, his betrothed came to him. Her manner
seemed strange.

'Does anything ail you, Margaret? ' he asked, as they left the Square.

'Everything,' she answered, looking about her with ostentatious
secrecy. 'You are a most annoying person.