“Not until a year, and then if no other love has come between us, I shall tell you again that I love you,” he said, and she replied: “A year is a long time, and so much may happen to us both.” It did seem long to her, but to him, who was so much older, it seemed as nothing, if at the end he could hope to win the girl who walked so silently by his side until the house was reached, where he said good-night to her and then rode back to town, feeling, in spite of her assertion to the contrary, that there was a grain of hope for him, if he would bide his time patiently, and feeling, too, a great remorse and hatred for himself for what he had said of Phil. CHAPTER XXV. PHIL’S WOOING. When Phil left Reinette so suddenly he was full of resentment, for she had been unusually unreasonable and exasperating, and he meant what he said when he told her he would not come to her again if she wrote him a hundred notes of apology. She had called him a bore, and a spooney, and a Miss Nancy, and he did not know what else; and his anger continued all through the day and night when he lay awake thinking of her, and how she looked with the great tears standing in her flashing eyes as she bade him leave her and never come again. “And I won’t, by Jove!” he said, as he was dressing himself in the morning; but when breakfast was over, and he had sat for an hour or more with his mother and sisters he began to feel terribly _ennuied_, and to wonder why Grace and Ethel would be so dull and tame, and take so much interest in their worsteds, as if their lives depended upon having the right shades of wool in their roses. They were nice girls, of course, he thought, but quite commonplace and old-maidish, and he was puzzled to know how he should dispose of his time, now that he could not go to Reinette. It had been his custom to ride over to Hetherton Place quite early in the day, and stay until late in the afternoon, but that was over now; he was never going there again, and life had rather a dreary lookout for Phil when he at last left the house and sauntered slowly toward Mr. Beresford’s office.