ovely thick
black hair, just made for poking one's fingers through--I realized it
to the full. Jack was grown up. The dear old days of bird-nesting and
nutting and coasting and fishing and general delightful goings-on were
over forever.

I was sorry at first. I wanted "Jack." "Dr. Willoughby" seemed too
distinguished and far away.

I suppose he found a change in me, too. I had put on long skirts and
wore my hair up. I had also found out that I had a complexion, and
that sunburn was not becoming. I honestly thought I looked pretty, but
Jack surveyed me with decided disapprobation.

"What have you done to yourself? You don't look like the same girl.
I'd never know you in that rig-out, with all those flippery-trippery
curls all over your head. Why don't you comb your hair straight back,
and let it hang in a braided tail, like you used to?"

This didn't suit me at all. When I expect a compliment and get
something quite different I always get snippy. So I said, with what I
intended to be crushing dignity, "that I supposed I wasn't the same
girl; I had grown up, and if he didn't like my curls he needn't look
at them. For my part, I thought them infinitely preferable to that
horrid, conceited-looking moustache he had grown."

"I'll shave it off if it doesn't suit you," said Jack amiably.

Jack is always so provokingly good-humoured. When you've taken pains
and put yourself out--even to the extent of fibbing about a
moustache--to exasperate a person, there is nothing more annoying than
to have him keep perfectly angelic.

But after a while Jack and I adjusted ourselves to the change in each
other and became very good friends again. It was quite a different
friendship from the old, but it was very pleasant. Yes, it was; I
_will_ admit that much.

I was provoked at Jack's determination to settle down for life in
Valleyfield, a horrible, humdrum, little country village.

"You'll never make your fortune there, Jack," I said spitefully.
"You'll just be a poor, struggling country doctor all your life, and
you'll be grey at forty."

"I don't expect to make a fortune, Kitty," said Jack quietly. "Do you
think that is the one desirable thing? I shall never be a rich man.
But riches are not the only thing that makes life pleasant."

"Well, I think they have a good deal to do with it, anyhow," I
retorted. "It's all very well to pretend to despise wealth, but it's
generally a case of sour grapes. _I_ will own up honestly that