“Thank you so much, Miss Beatup—it’s awfully kind of you. Yes, I’m awfully happy, and”—coyly—“I hope Harry is too. But we mustn’t stop any more—Harry has still the remains of his cold. _Do_ turn up your collar, you naughty boy.” Nell walked away rigid with contempt. “She’s silly and she’s vulgar—she’s vulgarer than I, for all I’m only a farmer’s daughter. ‘Naughty boy!’—how common! She’s worse than Ivy.” Miss Marian gave up her Red Cross work, and was seen going for long walks with her Harry, and accompanying him on his parish rounds. She was a big, ungainly, soapily clean female, with a certain uncouth girlishness which did not endear her to the curate’s flock. Nell could not imagine what he “saw in her”—she certainly did not read the _Sermons of St. Gregory_. She wondered if he had loved her long—the parish said “years,” but that he had been unable to propose (1) till an expected legacy arrived, (2) till Miss Marian was sure she could get nobody else. At all events, he must have been in love with her during those days of Nell’s mirage—it was another bitter realisation for her to swallow, another choking mouthful of humble-pie. The poor little teacher crept about forlornly. She had not officially given up her Sunday-school class, but she seized flimsy pretexts to keep away; she even sometimes stayed away from church—then would force herself to go thrice of a Sunday, in case her absence should be put down to its true cause. She dodged the curate and Marian in the lanes, but she seemed to run into them at every corner—they always seemed to be going by the schoolhouse window. One evening, as she passed Mr. Smith’s cottage by the church, she saw the firelight leaping in his uncurtained study, and two dark figures stooping together against the glow. She stopped and stared in, like a beggar watching a feast; the table was laid for tea, and there were his books and his pictures, all ruddy in the firelight, the flickering, shuttled walls of the little room in which she had never set foot—his home. Marian was there; she would pour out his tea and hand him his cup. She would say, “Eat some more, dear; you’ve had a tiring day.” Then she would make him lie back in his armchair and put his feet to the fire, and she would curl up at his feet and read him the _Sermons of St. Gregory_.... No, she wouldn’t do anything like this. Nell laughed—that woman was Nell, not Marian. She was putting herself where she wanted to be, in the other’s place. Marian would say, “Don’t eat all the cake, naughty boy.” And then she would go and sit on his knee. Ugh!... And Nell, who would have done so differently, stood outside in the November dusk, with tears and rain on her face, and little cold, red hands clenched in impotent longing. 4