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 new dresses when the roosters began to sell. She could hear fat Mrs. Glenn puffing and laughing her way up the little crests of the road and could guess that her thin husband was doing his best to help her. She was so interested in the folks ahead that she forgot to be afraid and never once glanced back into the shadows. Had she done so she might have seen David loitering along, keeping faithful watch over her. So nicely did he time his steps that when she reached the door of the minister's country house he was right behind her, and all Green Valley saw them come in together. When Jocelyn, in slipping from her evening wrap, turned and saw him and flushed, he covered her confusion by saying reproachfully but gently: "Those slippers are ever so pretty, Jocelyn, but you ought not to wear them on these rough country roads and they are hardly warm enough for these cool evenings, are they?"