Percival in these happy, happy months as right-hand man to the Rough 'Uns on the famously prospering little horse farm often told himself that his life had been--as he expressed it--in three absolutely different periods. He found a wonderful pleasure in dividing them off and reviewing them. Daily, and often more than once in a day, when he had a pony out at exercise, he would pull up on the summit of rising ground and release his thoughts to wander over those periods as his eyes reviewed from point to point the landscape stretched beneath him; his mind aglow with what it tasted just as his body glowed from his exercise of schooling the pony in the saddle. Three periods, as he would tell himself. The first had ended with that night when he came to Dora in the drive. Everything was different after that. Then all his life with Japhra and with Ima in the van--the tough, hard, good life that ended with the fight. The third--he now was in the third! Two had been lived and left, and in review had for their chief burthen the picture of how, as he had said during his convalescence, every one had been so jolly, jolly good to him. Two had been lived and had shaped him--"a sort of _thing_ for other people's plans"; and what kind plans! and what dear planners! and he, of their fondness, how happy a thing!--to this third period that sung to him in every hour and that went mistily into the future whose mists were rosy, rosy, rose-red and snow-white, Snow-White-and-Rose-Red.... III In the first few months, before Rollo and Lady Burdon took their departure for the two years' travel, he was daily, in the intervals from his work, with "old Rollo"; Dora often with them. Nothing would satisfy Rollo for the few weeks that lay between Percival's beginning of his duties with the Hannafords and his own start for the foreign tour but that they must be spent at Burdon Old Manor, nothing would please him to fill in those days but to pass them in Percival's company. He made no concealment of his affection for his friend. Men not commonly declare to one another the liking or the deeper feeling they may mutually entertain. The habit belongs to women, and that it was indulged by Rollo was mark in him of the woman element that is to be observed in some men. It is altogether a different quality from effeminacy, this woman element. Sex is a chemical compound, as one might say, and often are to be met men on the one hand and women on the other in whom one might believe the male or female form that has precipitated came very nearly on the opposite side of the division--women who are attracted by women and to whom women are attracted; and men, manly enough but curiously unmannish, who are noticeably sensible to strongly male qualities and who arouse something of a brotherly affection in men in whom the male attributes ring sharp and clear as a touch on true bell.