little body as she stood there in her garden
that David wondered how he had ever for a moment doubted her and what
madness in his blood had made him yield to the cruelty that had shut
her heart and door to him.

For closed they were and gone was the simple, confiding girl who had
picnicked with him one May day. In her place was this quiet young
woman who talked to him pleasantly but did not ask him in, and who
scared him with her calm and sweetness and drove the stumbling
explanation from his lips.

So Jocelyn was laying out her pretty things and sighing. As long as
she was not going with David she decided to wear the smart slippers
with the high heels and the pretty buckles. David did not approve of
high heels.

She knew that a great many of the Green Valley women would wear dresses
with collars to their chins. So she smiled just a bit wickedly as she
glanced at the soft, misty dress like pink sea foam, from which her
head and lovely throat rose like a flower. She wondered if it was
wicked to be glad that she was pretty and to want David to see just how
pretty she really was.

She didn't want to go, but go she must, for she knew Green Valley. She
knew it and loved it. But she feared it too, because she did not know
it well enough.

So half-past eight found her stepping daintily and a little tipsily in
her high-heeled slippers over the road, after the last stragglers. She
did not want to be seen going in alone and so hung back till the last,
a lonely little figure in the cool shadows. Yet she was not so far
back that she could not feel the comforting nearness of the folks
ahead. She even heard snatches of conversation and smiled
understandingly, for she too knew now the little daily trials, the
family sorrows and dissensions, the occasional soul tempests, the
laughable ways and tenderly pathetic ambitions of these simple,
guileless human folks.

She heard enough to know that the couple just ahead was Sam Bobbins and
his wife, Dudy; the Sam Bobbins who tried to get rich raising violets
and failed; who then began raising mushrooms in his cellar and failed;
who last year spent good money trying to raise pedigreed dogs and
failed; and who only the week before paid ten dollars for a fancy
rooster and was happily telling his neighbors how rich he was going to
be, selling fighting stock. His wife stepped on her skirt and ripped
it. Jocelyn could hear her worried wail and Sam comforting her with
promises of