Connie has been at the farmhouse but once since her first visit there, and that was in the summer eight years after the memorable Christmas, and when she was fourteen and Kenneth twenty-two. He had dreamed of her coming night after night, and always saw her in her blue cloak and hood, as she had been when he bade her good-by. He knew there must be a change, but was not quite prepared for the slender, dignified girl, who wore an enormous hat and called him Mr. Stannard. She was, however, inexpressibly lovely, he thought, with her flower-like face and great blue eyes, which laughed when she laughed, but oftener drooped shyly under long, thick lashes. But for the eyes, and the smile which lighted up her whole face, Kenneth would hardly have recognized in her the little girl of six whom he had drawn for miles and miles through slush and mud. Did she remember it, he wondered, and the Christmas tree? If she did, she made no sign, and he would not refer to it, or tell her that he knew the contents of the prayer-book now as well as she did. She could only spend a day, or a part of it, as her aunt had left her at the station, while she went on to Albany to visit a friend, and was to call for her in the evening. She was very sweet and gracious, but a little too dignified for her years, Kenneth thought, as he tried to entertain her. “Would you like to go to the huckleberry pasture?” he asked, after dinner was over. “Oh, yes,” she said, with the old eagerness of manner, and they were soon on their way to the spot where they had once had their Christmas tree. It was no longer used for sheep, for the deacon had none. But Kenneth had kept the place up, and when the old chair fell to pieces he made another, in which he sometimes sat on Sunday afternoons, reading Connie’s prayer-book. “Oh, I remember this place so well,” Connie said, sitting down in the chair, and drawing long breaths as she looked off across the stretches of woods and valleys and hills, bright in their summer robes and bathed in sunshine. Kenneth was standing where the tree had stood, leaning on a timber which supported that side of the inclosure, and Connie thought what a fine face and figure he had, and felt a faint stir of something she could not define, as she met his eyes fixed so earnestly upon her. “Tell me of your college life,” she said. “I was so glad when I heard you had gone. Was that cousin of yours there, too, and where is he? You know I have never seen him.”