To the girl, longing for a romance, the idea of the young man's resolution was delightful. She looked at him with a little quivering thrill of impatience, as if she would have had him do something towards the great end that very moment. Her small, uplifted face was flushed, and her eyes were like stars. The brightening light outside shone on the soft brown velvet of her dress, and something in her eager, lightly-poised attitude gave Reynold the impression of a dainty brown-plumaged, bright-eyed bird, ready for instant flight. He almost stretched an instinctive hand to grasp and detain her, lest she should loose her hold of the iron ring and be gone. "I know you will succeed--you will come back!" she exclaimed. "How long first, I wonder?" "_Shall_ I succeed?" said Reynold, half to himself, but half-questioning her to win the sweet, unconscious assurance, which meant so little, yet mocked so deep a meaning. "Yes!" she replied. "You will! You must be master here." Master! She might have put it in a dozen different ways, and found no word to waken the swift, meaning flash in his eyes which that word did. Her pulses did not quicken, she perfectly understood that he was thinking of Mitchelhurst. She could not understand what mere dead earth and stone Mitchelhurst was to the man at her side. "You will have to restore the church one of these days," she said. Harding nodded. "Certainly. But it will be very ugly, anyhow." "Well, at least you must have the roof mended. And now, please, will you get the key? It is on the ledge of that pew just across the aisle. I think we had better be going--it has almost left off raining." She stepped outside and put up her umbrella, while he locked up his ancestors, smiling grimly. It seemed rather unnecessary to turn the key on the family party in that dusty little corner. They were quiet folks, and, as he had said, they would wait for him and his fortune not impatiently. If he could have shut in the brightness of youth, the warmth and life and sweetness which alone could make the fortune worth having, if he could have come back in the hour of success to unfasten the door and find all there--then indeed his big key would have been a priceless talisman. Unfortunately one can shut nothing safely away that is not dead. The old Rothwells were secure enough, but the rest was at the mercy of time and change, and all the winds that blow.