Always there was wonder, a sense of unreality in his mind; a feeling that somehow, in some way, he was wrong. He must be wrong. Strangely enough, these last few days he had thought more constantly of Ellice than of Joan. He had pictured her again and again to himself—a little, white-clad, barefooted figure standing against the dusky background of the hallway, framed by the open door. He remembered the colour in her cheeks, and her brave championship of the other woman; but he remembered most of all the look in her eyes when she had said to him, “Please, please don’t!” “I shall never kiss her again,” he said, and said it to himself, and knew as he said it that he was denying himself the thing for which now he longed. He had kissed Joan’s cold cheek, he had kissed her hand, but her lips had not been for him. He had wondered once if they ever would be, and he had cared a great deal; now he ceased to wonder. “I shall never kiss Gipsy again,” he thought, and, turning, saw her. “So you—you didn’t go to Church, Gipsy?” “I thought you had gone to Starden.” They stood and looked at one another. “No. I don’t think I shall go to Starden to-day.” “But they expect you.” “I—I don’t think I shall go to-day, Gipsy. Shall we go for a walk across the fields?” “You ought to go to Starden,” she said. “She—she will expect you.” But a spirit of reckless defiance had come to him. “She won’t miss me if I don’t go.” “No, she won’t miss you,” the girl said softly, and her voice shook. “So—so come with me, Gipsy girl.” “If you wish it.” “You know I do.” Yet when they went together across the fields, when they came to the edge of the hop-garden and saw the neatly trailing vines, which this year looked better and more promising than he could ever remember before, they had nothing to say to one another, not a word. Once he took her hand and held it for a moment, then let it go again; and at the touch of her he thrilled, little dreaming how her heart responded. He scarcely looked at her. If he had, he might have seen a glow in her cheeks, a brightness in her eyes, the brightness born of a new and wonderful hope. “After all, after all,” the girl was thinking. “I believe he cares for me a little—not so much as he loves her, but a little, a little, and I love him.” Connie smiled on them as they came in together. It was as she liked to see them. She noticed the deep colouring in the girl’s cheeks, the new brightness in her eyes, and Connie, who always acted on generous impulses, kissed her. “What’s that for?” Johnny cried. “Haven’t you one for me too, Con?” “Always, always,” she said. She put her arms about his neck and hugged him. It seemed as if the clouds that had so long overcast this little house had drifted away this calm Sabbath day, and the sun was shining down gloriously on them.