might have reasonably expected. The beginning of difficulty very gradually rose between them, and since they had never quarrelled in their lives, for all John's temper and Dinah's frankness, the difference now bred in a late autumn day gave both material for grave thought. They met by appointment, strolled in the woods, then climbed through plantations of sweet-smelling spruce, till they reached great rocks piled on a little spur of the hillside under Buckland Beacon. Here the granite heaved in immense boulders that broke the sweep of the hill and formed a resting-place for the eye between the summit of the Beacon and the surface of the river winding in the lap of the Vale beneath. Hazel Tor, as these masses of porphyry were called, now rose like a ridge of little mountainous islets from a sea of dead heath and fern. The glories of the fall were at an end, and on an afternoon when the wind was still and the sky grey and near, pressing down on the naked tree-tops, Dinah, sitting here with her sweetheart, chatted amiably enough. The cicatrix on her cheek was still red, but the wound had cleanly healed and promised to leave no scar. Johnny, however, was doubtful. "I won't say you won't be marked now." "If kissing could make me safe, I should be." "I wish you'd give me something to kiss you for; and that's the name of the day next Spring we're to wed." "Isn't it enough if we say next Spring?" "Quite enough, if you mean next Spring. But I don't know whether you do; and more do you know. And for that matter you never have said next Spring. If you say the word, then you'll keep your word; but you haven't, and patient though I am, I can't help wondering sometimes why you don't." "You're not the only one that wonders for that matter." "Of course I'm not. Cousin Joe wonders every time I see him, and father wonders, and mother does more than wonder. In fact it's getting to be a bit awkward and unreasonable." "I know it is, Johnny. I never thought it would be so difficult when the time came." "So you grant that the time has come--that's something." "I do grant it. I dare say a man doesn't quite realise what a tremendous thing it is for a girl to lose her liberty like this." He was irritable. "Do chuck that! I'm fed up with it. If you think what you call liberty at the farm is better than living with me in your own house, you must be a fool, Dinah." "No," she said. "I'm right. Marriage cuts into a woman's liberty a lot. It's bound to, and, of course, home along with foster-father must be a much freer sort of life than home along with you." "You are a cold-blooded little devil sometimes," he said. "What's freedom, or slavery, or any other mortal thing got to do with a man and woman if they love one another? You don't hear me saying I shall lose my bachelor liberty."