“Glad you’ve come round to my way of thinking at last. Knew you would. Well, if I can do anything for you in the way of helping you to get a decent living, you may command me fully. Think over what I’ve said, and come and dine with me at Pincote to-morrow at seven sharp.” “It would be worth something,” said Tom to himself as he went on his way, “to know what the squire’s opinion about me really is; to have a glimpse at the portrait of me in all its details which he has evolved from his own inner consciousness. Strange that in a little town like this, where everybody knows everybody else’s business better than he knows his own, if a man venture to step out of the beaten track prescribed for him by custom and tradition, and is bold enough to strike out a path for himself, he is at once set down as being, of necessity, either a lunatic or a scapegrace—unless, indeed, his lunacy chance to win for him either a fortune or a name. And then how changed the tone!” Next evening Tom found himself at Pincote. The squire introduced him in brief terms to his daughter, and then left the room for a few minutes, for which Tom did not thank him. “What can I say to Miss Culpepper that will be likely to interest her?” he asked himself. “Does she go in for private theatricals, or for ritualism and pet parsons? Does she believe in soup kitchens and visiting the poor, or would she rather talk about the new prima donna, and the last new poem?” Miss Culpepper had sat down again at the piano, and was striking a few chords now and then, in an absent-minded way. She was by no means a pretty girl in the ordinary acceptation of the term. Her face was a good one, without being strikingly handsome. She had something of her father’s shrewd, keen look, but with an underlying expression of goodness and kindliness, difficult to define, but unmistakably there. She had large blue-gray eyes and magnificent teeth. Her complexion, lily-clear during the winter months, was already freckled by the warm May sunshine, and would be more so before the summer was over. Finally, her hair was red—not auburn, but an unmistakable red. But Tom Bristow had rather a weakness for red hair—not perhaps for the deep, dull, fiery red which we sometimes see. He accepted it, as the old Venetians accepted it—as one of the rarest types of beauty, as something far superior to your commonplace browns and blacks. And then he did not object to freckles—in moderation. He looked upon them as one of the signs of a sound country-bred constitution. As Jane Culpepper sat there by the piano, in the sunny May eventide, in her white dress, trimmed with pale green velvet, with her red hair coiled in great hands round her little head—with her frank smile, and her clear honest-looking eyes, she filled up in Tom’s mind his ideal picture of a healthy, pure-minded English country girl, and it struck him that he could have made a very pleasant water-colour sketch of herself and her surroundings.