Aroused by a sound from the house, he looked up and saw her standing on the edge of the ploughed field, her lace scarf blown softly in the April wind. After a single minute of breathless surprise he tossed the long ropes on the ground, and, leaving the plough, came rapidly across the loose clods of upturned earth. "Did you come because I was thinking of you?" he asked simply, with the natural directness which had appealed so strongly to her fearless nature. "Were you thinking of me?" her faint smile shone on him for an instant; "and were your thoughts as grave, I wonder, as my reason for coming?" "So you have a reason, then?" "Did you think I should dare to come without one?" The light wind caught her scarf, blowing the long ends about her head. From the frame of soft white lace her eyes looked dark and solemn and very distant. "I had hoped that you had no other reason than kindness." He had lost entirely the rustic restraint he had once felt in her presence, and, as he stood there in his clothes of dull blue jean, it was easy to believe in the gallant generations at his back. Was the fret of their gay adventures in his blood? she wondered. "You will see the kindness in my reason, I hope," she answered quietly, while the glow of her sudden resolution illumined her face, "and at least you will admit the justice--though belated." He drew a step nearer. "And it concerns you--and me?" he asked. "It concerns you--oh, yes, yes, and me also, though very slightly. I have just learned--just a moment ago--what you must have thought I knew all along." As he fell back she saw that he paled slowly beneath his sunburn. "You have just learned--what?" he demanded. "The truth," she replied; "as much of the truth as one may learn in an hour: how it came that you are here and I am there--at the Hall." "At the Hall?" he repeated, and there was relief in the quick breath he drew; "I had forgotten the Hall." "Forgotten it? Why, I thought it was your dream, your longing, your one great memory." Smiling into her eyes, he shook his head twice before he answered. "It was all that--once." "Then it is not so now?" she asked, disappointed, "and what I have to tell you will lose half its value." "So it is about the Hall?" With one hand she held back the fluttering lace upon her bosom, while lifting the other she pointed across the ploughed fields to the old gray chimneys huddled amid the budding oaks. "Does it not make you homesick to stand here and look at it?" she asked. "Think! For more than two hundred years your people lived there, and there is not a room within the house, nor a spot upon the land, that does not hold some sacred association for those of your name." Startled by the passion in her words, he turned from the Hall at which he had been gazing. "What do you mean? " he demanded imperatively. "What do you wish to say?"