"You may trust me," in a softly earnest voice on the other side. "Thank you both," said Percival, but his eyes thanked Sissy. "What have you been after?" asked Horace. "I thought most likely you were off to the friend you met this morning." The astonishing way in which circumstances conspired to aid in guarding the mystery! "I have been with him," said Percival. (We value the opinion of others too much very often for our own peace. Queer, unsubstantial things those opinions often are. "I have been with him." Sissy felt a little glow of kindliness toward the unknown: it might have been, "I have been with her." She was prejudiced in his favor, and sure that he was a nice fellow. Horace was ready to stake something on his conviction that he was a bad lot, this fellow Percy had picked up, and that Percy knew it.) Percy was still warm with the chivalrous devotion which had been kindled in him that evening. It was reserved for the colder morning light to reveal to him that what with Lottie on the hillside and Addie in Langley Wood he was plunging into little adventures which were hardly consistent with the character of a most prudent young man. Yet such was the character he was supposed to have undertaken to support in the world's drama. They reached the door, and Horace went in, but Sissy lingered yet a moment on the threshold. "Isn't it all beautiful?" she said, taking one more look: "if it could only last!" Percival smiled: "Sissy, have _you_ learnt that?" "November--bare boughs and bitter winds--I hate to think of it," she said. "I would say, 'Don't think of it,' but it would be no good," he replied. "When the thought of change has once occurred to you while you look at a landscape, it is a part of every landscape thenceforward. But it gives a bitter charm." "Spring will come again," she said; "but death and parting and loss--they are so dreadful! And growing old! Oh, Percival, why must they all be?" He shrugged his shoulders: "The whole world echoes your 'Why?' Sissy, I wish I could help you, but I can't. I can only tell you that I understand what you feel. It is very terrible looking forward to age--to loss of powers, hopes and friends. One feels sometimes as if one could not tread that long gray road to the grave." Sissy shivered, as if she saw it drawn out before her eyes. "But after all it may be brighter than we think," he went on after a pause. "There is joy and beauty in change, as well as bitterness. If everything in the world were fixed and unalterable, would not that be far more terrible? As it is, we have all the possibilities on our side. Who knows what gladness may grow out of endless change?" Yet even as he spoke he was conscious of a wild, impotent longing to snatch her--she was so delicate and sweet--from beneath the great revolving wheels of time, with a cry of Stay as you are, and be loved for ever.