followed seemed to have grown
out of that look: his way of speaking to her, his quickness in catching
her meaning, his evident eagerness to prolong their excursions and to
seize on every chance of being with her.

The signs of his liking were manifest enough; but it was hard to guess
how much they meant, because his manner was so different from anything
North Dormer had ever shown her. He was at once simpler and more
deferential than any one she had known; and sometimes it was just when
he was simplest that she most felt the distance between them. Education
and opportunity had divided them by a width that no effort of hers could
bridge, and even when his youth and his admiration brought him nearest,
some chance word, some unconscious allusion, seemed to thrust her back
across the gulf.

Never had it yawned so wide as when she fled up to her room carrying
with her the echo of Mr. Royall's tale. Her first confused thought
was the prayer that she might never see young Harney again. It was
too bitter to picture him as the detached impartial listener to such
a story. "I wish he'd go away: I wish he'd go tomorrow, and never come
back!" she moaned to her pillow; and far into the night she lay there,
in the disordered dress she had forgotten to take off, her whole soul
a tossing misery on which her hopes and dreams spun about like drowning
straws.

Of all this tumult only a vague heart-soreness was left when she opened
her eyes the next morning. Her first thought was of the weather, for
Harney had asked her to take him to the brown house under Porcupine,
and then around by Hamblin; and as the trip was a long one they were to
start at nine. The sun rose without a cloud, and earlier than usual she
was in the kitchen, making cheese sandwiches, decanting buttermilk into
a bottle, wrapping up slices of apple pie, and accusing Verena of having
given away a basket she needed, which had always hung on a hook in the
passage. When she came out into the porch, in her pink calico, which had
run a little in the washing, but was still bright enough to set off
her dark tints, she had such a triumphant sense of being a part of the
sunlight and the morning that the last trace of her misery vanished.
What did it matter where she came from, or whose child she was, when
love was dancing in her veins, and down the road she saw young Harney
coming toward her?

Mr. Royall was in the porch too. He had said nothing at breakfast, but
when she came