Nelly did not wait to hear Eve's reply. Swiftly and noiselessly she sprang from the terrace on to the smooth sod beneath, her muslin dress making no rustle as she moved. Away she sped down the green slopes; the sheep parted to left and right before her flying footsteps; the shepherd-lad stared after her in amazement. She did not take the road that led through the village. In her misery and bewilderment she remembered that she could not bear the friendly good-nights of the cottagers. She struck wildly across the fields, regardless of the wet grass, and the brambles that tore her thin skirts as she dashed through the gaps in the hedges, until she came to the side of the brook, where she was alone in her grief. She was not thinking at all; she was only feeling--feeling passionately and bitterly--that she had been cruelly wronged and deceived. "Oh those two!" she moaned aloud, as her home came in sight. "The man whom I loved--the girl whom I would have made my friend!" Robert Channell and his wife were sitting together in the library. He had been reading aloud: Shakespeare still lay open on his knee, and Rhoda occupied a low chair by his side. They were talking, as happy married people love to talk, of the old days when God first brought them together. While they chatted in low tones, the day was fast closing in. The French windows stood open, and the first breath of the night wind stole into the room. A dusky golden haze was settling down over the garden; the air was heavy with flower-scents and the faint odours of fallen leaves. Suddenly a great shower of petals from over-blown roses drifted through the casement, and Nelly swept in after them. She sank down on her knees, shivering in her limp, wet dress, and hid her face in her stepmother's lap. And then the story was told from beginning to end. An hour later, Rhoda was sitting by Nelly's pillow, talking to her in the sweet hush of the August twilight. Already the heat of anger had passed away. The girl's thoughts had gone back, as Rhoda knew they would, to that winter afternoon when Morgan had asked her to become engaged to him. "Mamma," she said, piteously, "he has never loved me at all. He gave me all he could give; but it was only the silver, not the gold. It is very, very humiliating, but it is the truth, and it must be faced. To-night when I heard him speaking to Eve Hazleburn, I understood the difference between love and liking. He liked me, and perhaps he saw--more than I meant him to see! O mamma, I was very young and foolish!" It touched Rhoda to hear Nelly speak of her old self in the past tense. Yet it was a fact; the youth and the folly had had their day. Nelly would never be so young again, for sorrow takes away girlhood when it teaches wisdom.