And I played well, for I was playing for the greatest
price I had ever commanded!"

"And then?" she asked softly, stroking her cheek with some young
beech-leaves.

"And then he kissed me, and--I took out my cheque-book," returned
Joyselle simply.

It was after four, and the wind had gone down, freeing the common from
the beautiful cloud-streams that had chased over it earlier in the day.

The red-headed girl and her young man had disappeared, and from where
they sat Joyselle and Brigit saw no signs of life.

"To-morrow it will be crowded with odious people," Brigit sighed.

"Why odious?"

"Well, I mean vulgar, noisy people."

He shook his head in a way that ruffled his halo of silver hair, and
laughed.

"You should not be a snob," he teased. "After all, you are marrying the
son of peasants."

"Peasants are different," she insisted, a little sulkily.

"Peasants are picturesque only in books, my dear. As for me, I like
happy people, and even your English 'noisy and vulgar' ones are happy, I
suppose, when they come up here on Sunday. Some day you and I will come
again. And bring Theo," he added suddenly.

Then he rose. "Come, we had better start to walk back." She obeyed in
silence.

"If I had not had genius," he continued as they reached the bottom of
the slope and turned homewards, "I should be now--what? A Norman peasant
in a black blouse driving, probably, a char-a-bancs to sell my fruit--or
my corn. I could never have been a gamekeeper like my father, for I
cannot kill. And if you, then, had come to Falaise and gone to the
market, you might have bought a pennyworth of cherries of me. And all
this might have been if I had not, one day, heard an old half-witted
blind man play a cracked fiddle on the high road, thirty years ago!"

She frowned, for she hated this kind of talk. It was too true, and it
hurt her baser pride, even while her nobler pride rejoiced in the very
humbleness of his origin because it emphasised his present greatness.

"But--you are you, and I am only--me," she returned, ungrammatical but
proudly humble.

He turned, his face flushing brilliantly. "Then you are proud of me?" he
cried.

Danger again. After a long pause, which visibly hurt him, she returned
with a smile, "Of course I am. Who would not be proud of such a
father-in-law?"

Half an hour later it was all over, the wonderful day was finished, and
to Brigit's amazement she was more than a little glad. It had been
deligh