"Nothing, except evil intentions," responded Aunt Abby, perusing the missive. "He must think you a fool to believe such bosh," she added severely, after finishing it. "Honest love doesn't grow like a mushroom in one night, and the difference between his position and yours gives the lie to all he says. I hope he will go away next week, and never come back." Whether Chip's studied avoidance of him, combined with the snubbing, served its purpose, or he decided his quest was hopeless, could only be guessed, for he was seen no more near the mill, and the next week his yacht left Christmas Cove, and Chip felt relieved. It had been an experience quite new to her, and, in spite of its annoyance, somewhat exciting. It also served another purpose of more value,--it recalled Ray to her by sheer force of contrast. She had felt hurt ever since the night she left Greenvale. She had meant to put him out of her thoughts and forget all the silly hours and promises at the lake; and yet she never had succeeded. Instead, her thoughts turned to him in spite of her pride. And now, contrasting and comparing that honest, manly lad, a playmate only, and yet a lover as well, with this polished, fulsome, flattering, shifty-eyed fop, who sneered at everything good, only made Ray, with his far different ways, seem the more attractive. Then conscience began to smite her. She had yielded to pride and put him away from her thoughts. His uncle had almost pleaded for her to return to Greenvale, if only for a visit. She knew Ray had spent weeks in searching for her; yet not once in all the two years since they parted had she sent him a line of remembrance. More mature now, Chip began to see her own conduct as it was, and to realize that she had been both ungrateful and heartless; but she could not confess it to any one, not even Aunt Abby. Chip's life had been a strange, complex series of moods of peculiar effect, and her conduct must be judged accordingly. First, the dense ignorance of years at Tim's Place, with its saving grace of disgust at such surroundings and such a life. Then a few months with people so different and so kind that it seemed an entrance into heaven, to be followed by weeks of a growing realization that she was a nobody, and an outcast unfit for Greenvale. And then came the climax of all this: the bitter sneers of Hannah, Ray's cool neglect, the consciousness that she was only a dependent pauper, and then her flight into the world and away from all that stung her like so many whips. But a revulsion of feeling was coming. Chip, no longer a simple child of the wilderness, was realizing her own needs and her own nature. Something broader and more satisfying than school life and the companionship of Aunt Abby was needed; yet how to find it never occurred to her.