“’Tis May without and May within!” might well have been Sydney’s song, as she literally 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 groaned over the ravages she made in “his conservatories” and “his gardens.” But Miss Lisle was a privileged person in his eyes, so his groans 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 martyr at the stake!
“Not that I grudge 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 Christians, 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 chapels of the great cathedral, by Katharine’s white-haired father, with only Sydney and the little cousin Sylvia present, and old Dr. Lorry,
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 who insisted upon coming, to see how his patient got through the ceremony. There were so few relations upon either side to come, even if the health of the bridegroom had been fit for anything but the quietest of weddings. St. Quentin asked Lady Frederica to be present from a sense of duty, but was neither surprised nor disappointed when she wrote to explain it was impossible to expect her to attend a wedding which was fixed for so unconscionably early an hour, but she sent her best wishes to them both. She also sent a handsome wedding present, for which the bill came in afterwards to St. Quentin. So there were only those few there to hear the words that made Katharine and St. Quentin man and wife at last. The honeymoon had been passed in a health-giving cruise on the Mediterranean, and now they were to come home.
Lady Frederica had never returned to the Castle after St. Quentin’s operation, and it cannot be said that her nephew missed her. He invited Mrs. Chichester to come and stay with Sydney during the period of his convalescence, and inwardly determined, as he saw the delight with which the girl showed all her favourite haunts to “mother,” that she should
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 have at least the female portion of the house of Chichester to stay with her as often as she liked. In fact, Katharine had already expressed her intention of being great friends with them all.
But Mrs. Chichester had gone back to London now, and for the fortnight of the honeymoon Miss Osric and Sydney had been alone, and had certainly made good use of their time in the business of arranging a welcome for St. Quentin and his bride.
The Castle was ablaze with flowers and the air ablaze with sunshine, as Sydney, her labours finished, but too excited to sit still and wait, went dancing onward through the Park and out into the village, where the hedges were fast breaking into the bridal white of hawthorn blossom. Miss Osric, as soon as all the work was finished, had discreetly betaken herself to the Vicarage, leaving the girl to welcome Katharine and her cousin alone.
It was four o’clock: they would hardly be here for another quarter of an hour, Sydney thought to herself, and she slackened her pace and looked upward at the gorgeous decorations with which the little village was aflame.
The children were all drawn up in a body
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 on the village green, under the charge of the schoolmistress, and armed with little, tight, hard bunches of flowers, to cast bef............