"I see." "And don't you think I'm right?" "Yes; the horse ought to have his choice in that matter of drinking." "I'm glad you agree with me. My dear old friend Jo Weatherhead is half inclined to think me wrong. He says I ought to consider the child's happiness first and foremost, and that, if being with fine folks don't make her happy, I ought to let her give them up. But May is very young still--barely eighteen; she hasn't had time to judge. I wouldn't have her think, later on, that this or that good thing might have befallen her if she had had her chance and seen more of the world. It's bitter to look back on opportunities lost or wasted, and that," added Mrs. Dobbs, changing her tone, and shaking hands with the young man, who had risen to go away, "is why I take the liberty of scolding _you_ now and then. But I hope an old granny like me may speak her mind without offence? That's one of our privileges." It seemed clear that Owen Rivers, at all events, was not offended. His visits to Jessamine Cottage grew longer and more frequent. It became an established custom for him to drop in at tea-time. Very often when May had been spending the afternoon at the Canon's house, he would escort her home through the fields. That was a longer way than by the streets; but so much pleasanter, that their preference for it was surely very natural. Oh, those rambles by the Wend, with the pearly evening sky above them, the dewy, flower-speckled grass under foot, and in their ears the sound of the sweet chimes, which seemed but to accompany some still sweeter melody, felt not heard. May gave herself no account of the charm which encompassed her. She looked not "before and after," but was happy, as youth alone can be happy, in the intense sweetness of the present. Later life has happiness of its own; but not that. It may be more or less, but it is different. Those young delights can no more return than a rose can furl itself again into a rosebud. And as to Owen, if his day-dream was sometimes pierced by a sharp ray of common sense from the work-a-day world, he turned his eyes away, and plunged still deeper into the rainbow-tinted cloudland of young love.