re touch of the
hand he laid on Theodora's arm.

"May I see you home, Miss Dix?" his words said. His tone said, "I am
going to see you home whether or no."

Theodora, with a deprecating look at Arnold Sherman, took his arm,
and Ludovic marched her across the green amid a silence which the very
horses tied to the storm fence seemed to share. For Ludovic 'twas a
crowded hour of glorious life.

Anne walked all the way over from Avonlea the next day to hear the news.
Theodora smiled consciously.

"Yes, it is really settled at last, Anne. Coming home last night Ludovic
asked me plump and plain to marry him,--Sunday and all as it was.
It's to be right away--for Ludovic won't be put off a week longer than
necessary."

"So Ludovic Speed has been hurried up to some purpose at last," said Mr.
Sherman, when Anne called in at Echo Lodge, brimful with her news. "And
you are delighted, of course, and my poor pride must be the scapegoat. I
shall always be remembered in Grafton as the man from Boston who wanted
Theodora Dix and couldn't get her."

"But that won't be true, you know," said Anne comfortingly.

Arnold Sherman thought of Theodora's ripe beauty, and the mellow
companionableness she had revealed in their brief intercourse.

"I'm not perfectly sure of that," he said, with a half sigh.

II. Old Lady Lloyd

I. The May Chapter

Spencervale gossip always said that "Old Lady Lloyd" was rich and mean
and proud. Gossip, as usual, was one-third right and two-thirds wrong.
Old Lady Lloyd was neither rich nor mean; in reality she was pitifully
poor--so poor that "Crooked Jack" Spencer, who dug her garden and
chopped her wood for her, was opulent by contrast, for he, at least,
never lacked three meals a day, and the Old Lady could sometimes achieve
no more than one. But she WAS very proud--so proud that she would have
died rather than let the Spencervale people, among whom she had queened
it in her youth, suspect how poor she was and to what straits was
sometimes reduced. She much preferred to have them think her miserly and
odd--a queer old recluse who never went anywhere, even to church, and
who paid the smallest subscription to the minister's salary of anyone in
the congregation.

"And her just rolling in wealth!" they said indignantly. "Well, she
didn't get her miserly ways from her parents. THEY were real generous
and neighbourly. There never was a finer gentleman than old Doctor
Lloyd. He was always doin