Two more trout were caught in quick succession, then luck and the morning turning together, the pair came out into the open fields under the shade of a group of old willows, to free themselves of the weight of rubber boots, and allow Eileen to rest a few moments after the rough tramp down stream that had been half climbing and half wading. May was withdrawing her veil, woven of apple blossoms in a green mist of unfolding leaves, to reveal June’s young splendour, and for the two sitting under the willows it was also early June; they were the children of neighbours, and though their parents were of widely different fortunes, they had been friends since Eileen had caught her first sunfish on a pin and string arrangement, rigged by Ernest, and he, for inattention to his lessons, had been forced to wear her pink shirred sunbonnet at school. Her father was a promoter and politician; his, a farmer and wagon-maker, who, following an oft-repeated story, died just as his son had begun to work his way through college. How often Eileen and he had planned what he would do and be when this was accomplished, and she had done once and for all with the city boarding school to which her mother’s, rather than her father’s, ambition had consigned her. Now she had accomplished in a way and returned, but for family reasons Ernest Wray, a born book-lover, was still plodding in the old paths of his father, the wagon-maker. “You hear the wind in the grass when you do not hear what I say,” said Eileen, presently, in a tone half laughing, half pettish, as Ernest, placing the creel in the water to keep the trout fresh, secured it from floating away with a stone. “Come and sit where you must look _at_ me and not beyond or through me, and answer the question I asked you half an hour ago. When does the Boy go to his mother’s people, so that you can carry out your plans?” “Did you ask me that before?” said Ernest. “Perhaps not in the same words, but the meaning was the same.” “Then I did not hear you, for I thought you said _our plans_, Eileen.” To the man, the girl stood for everything that beckoned him into the future; to the girl, the man at this time was an indispensable comrade when she was at home, upon whom she was eager to practise certain school-taught theories. Her influence over him fed a growing vanity, standing in the place of love, of which, as yet, she had really no comprehension. “Put it any way you choose, only tell me when you are going to send the Boy to his relations,” she said, this time in a voice of assurance. “I suppose it is too late now to rent the farm and sell the business before autumn. Of course you are four years too late for college, but you might still manage the law school. Father thinks that the trolley line through the upper road into Bridgeton is an assured thing, and that before long your farm could be turned into money for house lots; that is what we mean to do with our land.”