"I said to myself I wouldn't come to-day," went on Laurie, without looking at her. A new and excited note had come into his voice, responsive to her own. He gazed down at the fire, musing the while he spoke. "Then I found I couldn't help it. That's why I'm so late. I stayed in the shop till seven, and some fellows come in and wanted me to play. I took up the fiddle, and begun. But I hadn't more'n drew a note before I laid it down and put for the door. 'Dick, you keep shop,' says I. And I harnessed up, and drove like the devil." Amelia felt warm with life and hope; she was taking up her youth just where the story ended. "You ain't stopped swearin' yet!" she remarked, with a little excited laugh. Then, from an undercurrent of exhilaration, it occurred to her that she had never laughed so in all these years. "Well," said Laurie abruptly, turning upon her, "how am I goin' to start out? Shall we hark back to old scores? I know what come between us. So do you. Have we got to talk it out, or can we begin now?" "Begin now," replied Amelia faintly. Her breath choked her. He stretched out his arms to her in sudden passion. His hands touched her sleeves and, with an answering rapidity of motion, she drew back. She shrank within herself, and her face gathered a look of fright. "No! no! no!" she cried strenuously. His arms fell at his sides, and he looked at her in amazement. "What's the matter?" he demanded. Amelia had retreated, until she stood now with one hand on the table. She could not look at him, and when she answered, her voice shook. "There's nothin' the matter," she answered. "Only you mustn't--yet." A shade of relief passed over his face, and he smiled. "There, there!" he said, "never you mind. I understand. But if I come over the last of the week, I guess it will be different. Won't it be different, Milly?" "Yes," she owned, with a little sob in her throat, "it will be different." Thrown out of his niche of easy friendliness with circumstance, he stood there in irritated consciousness that here was some subtile barrier which he had not foreseen. Ever since John Porter's death, there had been strengthening in him a joyous sense that Milly's life and his own must have been running parallel all this time, and that it needed only a little widening of channels to make them join. His was no crass certainty of finding her ready to drop into his hand; it was rather a childlike, warmhearted faith in the permanence of her affection for him, and perhaps, too, a shrewd estimate of his own lingering youth compared with John Porter's furrowed face and his fifty-five years. But now, with this new whiffling of the wind, he could only stand rebuffed and recognize his own perplexity. "You do care, don't you, Milly?" he asked, with a boy's frank ardor. "You want me to come again?" All her own delight in youth and the warm naturalness of life had rushed back upon her.