ers between them.

"Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way,"
he sorrowed. "You ought not, and you are right. You belong to--Mr.
Phillotson. I suppose he has been to see you?"

"Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little. "Though I
didn't ask him to come. You are glad, of course, that he has been!
But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!"

It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his
honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were
deprecated by her. He went on to something else.

"This will blow over, dear Sue," he said. "The training-school
authorities are not all the world. You can get to be a student in
some other, no doubt."

"I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively.

Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more
intimate conversation. Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly
unhappy. But he had seen her, and sat with her. Such intercourse
as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life.
The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as
a parish priest, should learn.

But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her,
and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious.
Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her
redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must
have written almost immediately he had gone from her:

Forgive me for my petulance yesterday! I was horrid to
you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my
horridness. It was so dear of you not to be angry! Jude,
please still keep me as your friend and associate, with
all my faults. I'll try not to be like it again.

I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things
away from the T. S., &c. I could walk with you for half
an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant

SUE.

Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the
cathedral works when she came.

VI

Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty
concerning the writer of the above letter. He was Richard
Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at
Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his
native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the
south-west as the crow flies.

A glance at the place and its accessori