e ducks
had sprawled over his feet; and she threw herself on the bed, hat
and all, and burst out crying with rage and grief and mortification.

"She will think I am common," she moaned, "and I am not common!
Why did I say such things? It is not my way of talking. Why did I
criticise the way the portrait was hung? And she will think this
is what I really am, and it is not what I am! She will think I do
not even know how to sit in a chair, and she will tell Dent, and
Dent will believe her, and what will become of me?"

"Pansy," said Dent next afternoon, as they were in the woods
together, "you have won my mother's heart."

"Oh, Dent," she exclaimed, tears starting, "I was afraid she would
not like me. How could she like me, knowing me no better?"

"She doesn't yet know that she likes you," he replied, with his
honest thinking and his honest speech, "but I can see that she
trusts you and respects you; and with my mother everything else
follows in time."

"I was embarrassed. I did myself such injustice."

"It is something you never did any one else."

He had been at work in his quarry on the vestiges of creation; the
quarry lay at an outcrop of that northern hill overlooking the
valley in which she lived. Near by was a woodland, and she had
come out for some work of her own in which he guided her. They lay
on the grass now side by side.

"I am working on the plan of our house, Pansy. I expect to begin
to build in the autumn. I have chosen this spot for the site. How
do you like it?"

"I like it very well. For one reason, I can always see the old
place from it."

"My father left his estate to be equally divided between Rowan and
me. Of course he could not divide the house; that goes to Rowan:
it is a good custom for this country as it was a good custom for
our forefathers in England. But I get an equivalent and am to
build for myself on this part of the land: my portion is over here.
You see we have always been divided only by a few fences and they
do not divide at all."

"The same plants grow on each side, Dent."

"There is one thing I have to tell you. If you are coming into our
family, you ought to know it beforehand. There is a shadow over
our house. It grows deeper every year and we do not know what it
means. That is, my mother and I do not know. It is some secret in
Rowan's life. He has never offered to tell us, and of course we
have never asked him, and in fact mother and I have