She put the pastry into the oven, and sat lazily in the ingle, nursing her knees, and musing. She was thinking the whole time of Hieronymus, of his kind and genial manner, and his face with the iron-gray hair; she would remember him always, even if she never saw him again. Once or twice it crossed her mind that she had been foolish to speak so impatiently to him of her village life. He would just think her a silly, discontented girl, and nothing more. And yet it had seemed so natural to talk to him in that strain; she knew by instinct that he would understand, and he was the first she had ever met who would be likely to understand. The others--her father, her mother, David Ellis the exciseman, who was supposed to be fond of her, these and others in the neighborhood--what did they care about her desires to improve her mind, and widen out her life, and multiply her interests? She had been waiting for months, almost for years indeed, to speak openly to some one; she could not have let the chance go by, now that it had come to her. The puffs meanwhile were forgotten. When at last she recollected them, she hastened to their rescue, and found she was only just in time. Two were burned; she placed the others in a dish, and threw the damaged ones on the table. As she did so the kitchen door opened, and the exciseman came in, and seeing the pastry, he exclaimed: "Oh, Joan, making pastry! Then I’ll test it!" "You’ll do nothing of the sort," she said half angrily, as she put her hands over the dish. "I won’t have it touched. You can eat the burnt ones it you like." "Not I," he answered. "I want the best. Why, Joan, what’s the matter with you? You’re downright cross to-day." "I’m no different from usual," she said. "Yes, you are," he said; "and what’s more, you grow different every week." "I grow more tired of this horrid little village and every one in it, if that’s what you mean," she answered.