aves shining in the evening sun, amid which bounding girls,
gracefully clad in artistic arrangements of blue, brown, red, black,
and white, were playing at games, with laughter and chat, in all the
pride of life, the notes of piano and harp trembling in the air from
the open windows adjoining. Moreover, they were girls--and this was a
fact which Grace Melbury's delicate femininity could not lose sight
of--whose parents Giles would have addressed with a deferential Sir or
Madam. Beside this visioned scene the homely farmsteads did not quite
hold their own from her present twenty-year point of survey. For all
his woodland sequestration, Giles knew the primitive simplicity of the
subject he had started, and now sounded a deeper note.

"'Twas very odd what we said to each other years ago; I often think of
it. I mean our saying that if we still liked each other when you were
twenty and I twenty-five, we'd--"

"It was child's tattle."

"H'm!" said Giles, suddenly.

"I mean we were young," said she, more considerately. That gruff
manner of his in making inquiries reminded her that he was unaltered in
much.

"Yes....I beg your pardon, Miss Melbury; your father SENT me to meet
you to-day."

"I know it, and I am glad of it."

He seemed satisfied with her tone and went on: "At that time you were
sitting beside me at the back of your father's covered car, when we
were coming home from gypsying, all the party being squeezed in
together as tight as sheep in an auction-pen. It got darker and
darker, and I said--I forget the exact words--but I put my arm round
your waist and there you let it stay till your father, sitting in front
suddenly stopped telling his story to Farmer Bollen, to light his pipe.
The flash shone into the car, and showed us all up distinctly; my arm
flew from your waist like lightning; yet not so quickly but that some
of 'em had seen, and laughed at us. Yet your father, to our amazement,
instead of being angry, was mild as milk, and seemed quite pleased.
Have you forgot all that, or haven't you?"

She owned that she remembered it very well, now that he mentioned the
circumstances. "But, goodness! I must have been in short frocks," she
said.

"Come now, Miss Melbury, that won't do! Short frocks, indeed! You know
better, as well as I."

Grace thereupon declared that she would not argue with an old friend
she valued so highly as she valued him, saying the words with the easy
elusiveness that will