“I don’t like to air my plans too much. There’s many a slip, you know.” “You’ll want to come to the house and say good-by to the folks, and tell us all about it?” As he nodded assent, she turned and preceded him up the narrow path. “When will you be back?” she asked over her shoulder. “Maybe never. If I have any luck, I’d like the old people to come out to me. I’m not leaving anything else here.” “You needn’t have told _me_ so,” said Serene to herself. “Father, boys, here’s Don come in to say good-by. He’s going West to-morrow.” “Well, ’Doniram Jessup! Why don’t you give us a s’prise party and be done with it?” Don smiled cheerfully at this tribute to his secretive powers, and sitting down on the edge of the porch, began to explain. Serene glanced around to see that all were listening, and then slipped quietly out through the kitchen to the high back porch, where she found a seat behind the new patent “creamery,” and leaning her head against it, indulged in the luxury of a few dry sobs. Tears she dared not shed, for tears leave traces. Though “sparkin’” had not been Serene’s line, love may come to any human creature, and little Serene had learned more that spring than the teacher had meant to impart or she to acquire. When the five minutes she had allotted to her grief were past she went back to the group at the front of the house as unnoticed as she had left them. Her father was chaffing Jessup good-naturedly on his need of more room to grow in, and Don was responding with placid ease. It was not chaff, indeed, that could disturb his convictions as to his personal importance to the development of the great West. Presently he rose and shook hands with them all, including herself--for whom he had no special word--said a general good-by, and left them. “He’s thinking of himself,” thought Serene a little bitterly, as she watched him go down the yard; “he is so full of his plans and his future he hardly knows I am here. I don’t believe he ever knew it!” To most people the loss of the possible affection of Don Jessup would not have seemed a heavy one, but the human heart is an incomprehensible thing, and the next six weeks were hard for Serene. For the first time in her life she realized how much we can want that which we may not have, and she rebelled against the knowledge. “Why?” she asked herself, and “why?” Why should she have cared, since he, it seemed, did not? Why couldn’t she stop caring now? And, oh, why had he been so dangerously kind when he did not care? Poor little Serene! she did not know that we involuntarily feel a tenderness almost as exquisite as that of love itself toward whatever feeds the fountain of our vanity.