she added after a pause: "As things go, it's just as well you didn't hear what she said, I reckon." "About me, do you mean?" "She came down to meet another girl," pursued Cynthia coolly. "I was getting out, so I don't suppose they noticed me--a shabby old creature with a bundle. At any rate, when she kissed the other, she whispered something I didn't hear, and then, 'I've seen that man before--look!' That was when I stumbled, and that made me catch the next 'Where?' her friend asked her quickly, and she answered...." There was a pause, in which the warm dusk was saturated with the fragrance of the grape blossoms on the fence. "She answered?" repeated Christopher slowly. Cynthia looked up and down the road, and then gave the words as if they were a groan: "In my dreams." BOOK II . THE TEMPTATION CHAPTER I. The Romance that Might have Been With July there came a long rain, and in the burst of sunshine which followed it the young tobacco shot up fine and straight and tall, clothing the landscape in a rich, tropical green. >From morning till night the men worked now in the great fields, removing the numerous "suckers" from the growing plants, and pinching off the slender tops to prevent the first beginnings of a flower, except where, at long spaces, a huge pink cluster would be allowed to blossom and come to seed. Christopher, toiling all day alone in his own field, felt the clear summer dawn break over him, the golden noon gather to full heat, and the coming night envelop him like a purple mist. Living, as he did, so close to the earth, himself akin to the strong forces of the soil, he had grown gradually from his childhood into a rare physical expression of the large freedom of natural things. It was an unusually hot day in mid-August--the time of the harvest moon and of the dreaded tobacco fly--that he came home at the dinner hour to find Cynthia standing, spent and pale, beside the well. "The sun is awful, Christopher; I don't see how you bear it but it makes your hair the colour of ripe wheat." "Oh, I don't mind the sun," he answered, laughing as he wiped the sweat from his face and stooped for a drink from the tilted bucket. "I'm too much taken up just now with fighting those confounded tobacco flies. They were as thick as thieves last night." "Uncle Boaz is going to send the little darkies out to hunt them at sundown," returned Cynthia. "I've promised them an apple for every one they catch." Her gaze wandered over the broad fields, rich in promise, and she added after a moment, "Fletcher's crop has come on splendidly." "The more's the pity." For a long breath she looked at him in silence; at the massive figure, the face burned to the colour of terra-cotta, the thick, wheaten-brown hair then, with an impulsive gesture, she spoke in her wonderful voice, which held so many possibilities of passion: