chair, "my wits do
wander. Look at my wheatfield, over there on the skyline. Isn't
it lovely? And now I won't be able to harvest it. Sometimes I
wonder whether I'll ever finish anything I begin."

Enid put the chessmen back into their box. "Now that you are
better, you must stop feeling blue. Father says that with your
trouble people are always depressed."

Claude shook his head slowly, as it lay against the back of the
chair. "No, it's not that. It's having so much time to think that
makes me blue. You see, Enid, I've never yet done anything that
gave me any satisfaction. I must be good for something. When I
lie still and think, I wonder whether my life has been happening
to me or to somebody else. It doesn't seem to have much
connection with me. I haven't made much of a start."

"But you are not twenty-two yet. You have plenty of time to
start. Is that what you are thinking about all the time!" She
shook her finger at him.

"I think about two things all the time. That is one of them."
Mrs. Wheeler came in with Claude's four o'clock milk; it was his
first day downstairs.

When they were children, playing by the mill-dam, Claude had seen
the future as a luminous vagueness in which he and Enid would
always do things together. Then there came a time when he wanted
to do everything with Ernest, when girls were disturbing and a
bother, and he pushed all that into the distance, knowing that
some day he must reckon with it again.

Now he told himself he had always known Enid would come back; and
she had come on that afternoon when she entered his drug-smelling
room and let in the sunlight. She would have done that for nobody
but him. She was not a girl who would depart lightly from
conventions that she recognized as authoritative. He remembered
her as she used to march up to the platform for Children's Day
exercises with the other little girls of the infant class; in her
stiff white dress, never a curl awry or a wrinkle in her
stocking, keeping her little comrades in order by the acquiescent
gravity of her face, which seemed to say, "How pleasant it is to
do thus and to do Right!"

Old Mr. Smith was the minister in those days,--a good man who had
been much tossed about by a stormy and temperamental wife--and his
eyes used to rest yearningly upon little Enid Royce, seeing in
her the promise of "virtuous and comely Christian womanhood," to
use one of his own phrases. Claude, in the boys' class across the
aisle, used