d any more of your tramp? There was no news of him when I
left. I asked the Slumberleigh policeman about him again on my way to
the station."

"I have heard no more of him, though I keep his memory green. I have not
forgotten the fright he gave me. I had always imagined I was rather a
self-possessed person till that day."

"I am a coward myself when I am frightened," said Charles, consolingly,
"though at other times as bold as a lion."

They were both sitting under the flickering shadow of the already
yellowing horse-chestnut-tree, the first of all the trees to set the
gorgeous autumn fashions. But as yet it was paling only at the edges of
its slender fans. The air was sweet and soft, with a voiceless whisper
of melancholy in it, as if the summer knew, for all her smiles, her hour
had wellnigh come.

The rectory cows--the mottled one, and the red one, and the big white
one that was always milked first--came slowly past on their way to the
pond, blinking their white eyelashes leisurely at Charles and Ruth.

"It is almost as hot as that Sunday in July when we walked over from
Atherstone. Do you remember?" said Charles, suddenly.

"Yes."

She knew he was thinking of their last conversation, and she felt a
momentary surprise that he had remembered it.

"We never finished that conversation," he said, after a pause.

"No; but then conversations never are finished, are they? They always
seem to break off just when they are coming to the beginning. A bell
rings, or there is an interruption, or one is told it is bedtime."

"Or fools rush in with their word where you and I should fear to tread,
and spoil everything."

"Yes."

"And have you been holding the wool and tying up the flowers, as you so
graphically described, ever since you left Atherstone in July?"

"I hope I have; I have tried."

"I am sure of that," he said, with sudden earnestness, then added more
slowly, "I have not wound any wool; I have only enjoyed myself."

"Perhaps," said Ruth, turning her clear, frank gaze upon him, "that may
have been the harder work of the two; it sometimes is."

His light, restless eyes, with the searching look in them which she had
seen before, met hers, and then wandered away again to the level meadows
and the woods and the faint sky.

"I think it was," he said at last; and both were silent. He reflected
that his conversations with Ruth had a way of beginning in fun, becoming
more serious, and ending in silence.

T