‘Don’t,’ says Crosby quickly. ‘You’ll wake him.’ He points to Bonnie’s lovely little head, and Susan pauses in her flight. ‘Besides, I shan’t say another word—not one. I swear it. What I really wanted was your compassion. I have never had a keepsake given me in all my life, save one.’ ‘Surely one is enough,’ says Susan slowly. Curiosity, after a moment, overcomes her dignity, and she says unwillingly: ‘Is it a nice one?’ ‘I desire no nicer,’ says he. He pulls his watch from his pocket, and on the chain close to it—on a tiny silver ring of its own—hangs a silver sixpence. ‘That! Only a sixpence!’ Susan’s voice is rather uncertain. What sixpence is that? She—she didn’t— ‘Of course,’ says she, ‘I know a broken sixpence is a very usual thing between lovers. But this— It is not broken, and—and not old, either. I must say when she gave you a keepsake she—’ ‘She hardly gave it,’ says Crosby. ‘She only laid it on the last rung of a ladder that led up to some—’ That sentence is never finished. Bonnie’s head is now lying on Susan’s rug. But Susan herself is already far over there, her head very high indeed, and her rage and her indignation even higher. CHAPTER XXXI. ‘My love is like the sky— As distant and as high. Perchance she’s fair and kind and bright, Perchance she’s stormy, tearful quite— Alas! I scarce know why.’ ‘Is this Susan?’ Crosby, standing at the little gate leading into the Rectory garden, feels a spasm of doubt. He has come down this morning to make it up with her, as the children say, after that slight quarrel of yester eve—a quarrel that was all on her side. Her remorseless refusal to bid him good-bye had left him a little desolate. Is that really the sedate Susan, that slender nymph flying over there in the distance—racing, rather—with Tommy, as a willing prey, running before her? Crosby has, through time, grown accustomed to think of Susan as a demure maiden, slightly Puritan in type, though no doubt with a latent wilfulness lying beneath the calm exterior. But now that the latent wilfulness has broken loose, he finds himself unprepared for it. Susan running there in the sunshine, with her hair, apparently just out of the tub and hardly yet dry, floating behind her, is another creature altogether. And such hair, too! Such glorious waves on waves glinting golden in the sun’s bright rays, with Susan’s face peeping out of it now and then. How wild, how mad, how soft, the bright hair looks, and how sweet are the ringing cries that come from Susan’s parted lips! ‘The bear has you, Tommy. He’s coming. He’—making a dab at the excited Tommy—‘will have you soon. In another moment he’ll be on you, tearing you—’ Quite a sprint here on the part of Tommy, and increased speed accordingly on Susan’s part. ‘And his claws are sharp—sharp!’ Tommy, in his flight, turns terrified eyes on Susan over his shoulder.