chool, long evenings spent in reading to
his mother, and, from Spring to frost, the vineyard, with its
multitudinous necessities.

He felt, keenly, that his mother did not quite understand him. In fact,
nobody did, unless it was Rosemary, whom he had not seen for weeks.
Brave little Rosemary, for whom life consisted wholly of deprivations!
How seldom she complained and how often she had soothed his discontent!

It was three years ago that she had come shyly to the schoolhouse and
asked if she might borrow a book. He had known her, of course, before
that, but had scarcely exchanged a dozen words with her. When he saw
her, rarely, at church, Grandmother or Aunt Matilda was always with her,
and the Starrs had had nothing to do with the Marshs for several years
past, as Mrs. Marsh had been remiss in her social obligations.

[Sidenote: A Growing Interest]

At first, Rosemary had been purely negative to him, and he regarded her
with kindly indifference. The girl's personality seemed as ashen as her
hair, as colourless as her face. Her dull eyes seemed to see nothing, to
care for nothing. Within the last few months he had begun to wonder
whether her cold and impassive exterior might not be the shield with
which she protected an abnormal sensitiveness. Now and then he had
longed to awaken the woman who dwelt securely within the forbidding
fortress--to strike from the flint some stray gleams of soul.

Of late he had begun to miss her, and, each afternoon, to look with a
little more conscious eagerness for the scarlet thread on the hill-top
signalling against the grey sky beyond. His interest in her welfare was
becoming more surely personal, not merely human. During the Winter,
though he had seen her only twice, he had thought about her a great
deal, and had written to her several times without expecting an answer.

The iron bars of circumstance which bound her, had, though less
narrowly, imprisoned him also. It seemed permanent for them both, and,
indeed, the way of escape was even more definitely closed for Rosemary
than for him.

[Sidenote: A New Rosemary]

He sighed as he rose and brushed the chalk from his clothes. Through
force of habit, he looked up to the crest of the Hill of the Muses as he
locked the door. The red ribbon fluttered like an oriflamme against the
blue-and-white of the April sky. His heart quickened its beat a little
as he saw it, and his steps insensibly hastened as he began to climb the
hill.