"What is funny?" asked Mrs. Arbuthnot, her face clearing because
Mrs. Wilkins laughed.
"We are. This is. Everything. It's all so wonderful. It's so
funny and so adorable that we should be in it. I daresay when we
finally reach heaven--the one they talk about so much--we shan't find
it a bit more beautiful."
Mrs. Arbuthnot relaxed to smiling security again. "Isn't it
divine?" she said?
"Were you ever, ever in your life so happy?" asked Mrs. Wilkins,
catching her by the arm.
"No," said Mrs. Arbuthnot. Nor had she been; not ever; not even
in her first love-days with Frederick. Because always pain had been
close at hand in that other happiness, ready to torture with doubts,
to torture even with the very excess of her love; while this was the
simple happiness of complete harmony with her surroundings, the
happiness that asks for nothing, that just accepts, just breathes, just
is.
"Let's go and look at that tree close," said Mrs. Wilkins. "I
don't believe it can only be a tree."
And arm in arm they went along the hall, and their husbands would
not have known them their faces were so young with eagerness, and
together they stood at the open window, and when their eyes, having
feasted on the marvelous pink thing, wandered farther among the
beauties of the garden, they saw sitting on the low wall at the east
edge of it, gazing out over the bay, her feet in lilies, Lady Caroline.
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