Herring coloured. ’I beg your pardon. I meant no disparagement when I used that term. I meant only ordinarily happy, happy as the buttercups, and the birds and bees, as all nature that is content with the place God has given it, and the sunshine and sweet air that surround it. Why should you not be so? It is no privilege to have an ever-aching void in the heart, to be ever stretching after the moon. You will be happy in a sphere where you will do good and be beloved. When do you intend to be married?’ ’I do not know. There is no occasion for delay, and there is nothing to precipitate matters. But now—when I am married and settled into the Vicarage at Tawton, what is to become of that queer Joyce? Is she to come with me?’ ’I—I!’ Joyce was there in the door to answer for herself. ’Wherever the maister be, there be I too. He sed as how he’d never wear no stockings more but what I’d knit; and you wouldn’t have he go barefoot?’ John Herring turned his head, and looked at Joyce. ’You had better remain with Miss Cicely. I do not want you.’ ’I will not,’ answered Joyce, resolutely. ’I go with you.’ ’Then, I dare say, Genefer will find work for you on the farm, or in the house at Welltown. But you will not be so comfortable or happy as here.’ ’I care not,’ said the girl. ’I must follow you. I belongs to you. You bought me of vaither for shining gold. No, Miss Cicely, I follow the maister.’ ’Go your ways,’ said Cicely: ’you are each of you, in your several ways, idealists, and each following the unattainable.’ ’And now, beginning life,’ said Herring, ’all that has gone before is introductory to the real life; a rough and painful initiation into the axioms on which the problem will have to be worked out. We know now where we stand, and which is the direction in which we must set our faces, to plod on our way forward, hopeless indeed, but still, conscientiously forward.’ THE END. LONDON: PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE. AND PARLIAMENT STREET