d of thing, you know."

He glanced at Grace, as though seeking her approval of such an act of
self-sacrifice; but the girl laughed frankly as she answered, "I can't
fancy you tramping behind the plow in a jacket patched with flour-bags,
Geoffrey;" while, feeling myself overlooked, and not knowing what to say,
I raised my cap and awkwardly turned away. Still, looking back, I caught
the waft of a light dress among the fern, and frowned as the sound of
laughter came down the wind. These people had been making merry, I
thought, at my expense, though I had fancied Miss Carrington incapable of
such ungenerous conduct.

In this, however, I misjudged her, for long afterward I learned that Grace
was laughing at the stories her companion told of his strange experiences
with sundry recruits, until presently the latter said:

"She stoops to conquer, even a raw Lancashire lad. I congratulate you on
your judgment, Gracie. There is something in that untrained cub--could
recognize it by the steady, disapproving way he looked at me; but I am
some kind of a relative, which is presumably a warrant for impertinence."

Now a saving sense of humor tempered Miss Carrington's seriousness, and
Geoffrey Ormond joined in her merry laugh. In spite of his love of ease
and frivolous badinage, he was, as I was to learn some day, considerably
less of a good-natured fool than it occasionally pleased him to appear to
be.

Meantime, I strode homeward with the fierce longing growing stronger. I
hated the dingy office where I sat under a gas-jet making up the count of
yarn; and yet four weary years I had labored there, partly because I had
to earn my bread and because my uncle and sole guardian greatly desired I
should. It grew dark as I entered the valley which led to his house, for
the cotton-spinner now lived ten miles by rail from his mill, and the
sighing of the pine branches under a cold breeze served to increase my
restlessness. So it was with a sense of relief that I found my cousin
Alice waiting in a cosy corner of the fire-lit drawing-room. We had known
each other from childhood, and, though for that very reason this is not
always the case, we were the best of friends. She would be rich some day,
so the men I met in her father's business said; but if Alice Lorimer ever
remembered the fact, it made but little difference to her. She was
delicate, slight, and homely, with a fund of shrewd common-sense and a
very kindly heart, whose thoughts, how