ears generally bring painful disillusion. How many of
us can remember some fair-haired little girl who in our childhood
represented to us the very incarnation of feminine grace and beauty, for
whom we fetched and carried, for whom we bound nosegays on the heath and
stole apples from the orchard and climbed upon the table after desert, if
we were left alone in the dining-room, to lay hands on some beautiful
sweetmeat wrapped in tinsel and fringes of pink paper--have we not met
her again in after-life, a grown woman, very, very far from our ideal of
feminine grace and beauty? And still in spite of changes in herself and
ourselves there has clung to her memory through all those years enough of
romance to make our heart beat a little faster at the prospect of
suddenly meeting her, enough to make us wonder a little regretfully if
she was at all like the little golden-haired child we loved long ago.

But with John the feeling was stronger than that. It was but two years
and a half since he had seen Mrs. Goddard, and, not even knowing her
name, had erected for her a pedestal in his boyish heart. There was
moreover about her a mystery still unsolved. There was something odd and
strange in her one visit to the vicarage, in the fact that the vicar had
never referred to that visit and, lastly, it seemed unlike Mr. Ambrose to
have said nothing of her settlement in Billingsfield in the course of all
the letters he had written to John since the latter had left him. John
dwelt upon the name--Goddard--but it held no association for him. It was
not at all like the names he had given her in his imagination. He
wondered what she would be like and he felt nervously anxious to meet
her. Somehow, too, what he heard of the squire did not please him; he
felt an immediate antagonism to Mr. Juxon, to his books, to his amateur
scholarship, even to his appearance as described by Mrs. Ambrose, who
said he was such a thorough Englishman and wondered how he kept his hair
so smooth.

It was not long before he had an opportunity of judging for himself of
what Mr. Ambrose called the recent addition to Billingsfield society. On
the very afternoon of his arrival the vicar proposed to walk up to the
Hall and have a look at the library, and John readily assented. It was
Christmas Eve and the weather, even in Essex, was sharp and frosty. The
muddy road was frozen hard and the afternoon sun, slanting through the
oak trees that bordered the road beyond the vil