In June, Helen came home for a week. At the end of the week she left to take up her new duties at the summer camp for girls in Vermont. Albert and she were together a good deal during that week. Anticipating her arrival, the young man's ardent imagination had again fanned what he delighted to think of as his love for her into flame. During the last months of the winter he had not played the languishing swain as conscientiously as during the autumn. Like the sailor in the song “is 'eart was true to Poll” always, but he had broken away from his self-imposed hermitage in his room at the Snow place several times to attend sociables, entertainments and, even, dances. Now, when she returned he was eagerly awaiting her and would have haunted the parsonage before and after working hours of every day as well as the evening, if she had permitted, and when with her assumed a proprietary air which was so obvious that even Mr. Price felt called upon to comment on it. “Say, Al,” drawled Issachar, “cal'late you've cut out Eddie Raymond along with Helen, ain't ye? Don't see him hangin' around any since she got back, and the way you was actin' when I see you struttin' into the parsonage yard last night afore mail time made me think you must have a first mortgage on Helen and her pa and the house and the meetin'-house and two-thirds of the graveyard. I never see such an important-lookin' critter in MY life. Haw, haw! Eh? How 'bout it?” Albert did not mind the Price sarcasm; instead he felt rather grateful to have the proletariat recognize that he had triumphed again. The fly in his ointment, so to speak, was the fact that Helen herself did not in the least recognize that triumph. She laughed at him. “Don't look at me like that, please, please, don't,” she begged. “Why not?” with a repetition of the look. “Because it is silly.” “Silly! Well, I like that! Aren't you and I engaged? Or just the same as engaged?” “No, of course we are not.” “But we promised each other--” “No, we did not. And you know we didn't.” “Helen, why do you treat me that way? Don't you know that--that I just worship the ground you tread on? Don't you know you're the only girl in this world I could ever care for? Don't you know that?” They were walking home from church Sunday morning and had reached the corner below the parsonage. There, screened by the thicket of young silver-leafs, she stopped momentarily and looked into his face. Then she walked on. “Don't you know how much I care?” he repeated. She shook her head. “You think you do now, perhaps,” she said, “but you will change your mind.” “What do you mean by that? How do you know I will?” “Because I know you. There, there, Albert, we won't quarrel, will we? And we won't be silly. You're an awfully nice boy, but you are just a boy, you know.” He was losing his temper. “This is ridiculous!” he declared. “I'm tired of being grandmothered by you. I'm older than you are, and I know what I'm doing. Come, Helen, listen to me.”