Gilbert found the place suited his mood, and he gave himself up to thoughts of Joyce, and forgot the late encounter with his uncle. How delightful it was to build castles for the future--to think of a home near all this loveliness, where Joyce would reign in all her sweet beauty as his wife. The time had been when Gilbert had admired his cousin Gratian Anson, who was the daughter of his mother's aunt, and therefore his cousin only in the second degree. Now her free, bold bearing, her ringing voice, her fashionable dress and banter, jarred on him. Her laugh was like the rattle of a noisy brook over innumerable stones, when compared to Joyce's musical ripple, which was so real, and so entirely the outcome of her own happiness. Then how charming was her unconsciousness, and how her beauty was enhanced by the absence of all affectation; how pretty was her affection for her father and Piers, and how gracefully and simply she did all the little household duties which her mother expected from her! Some words of a favourite poet of his mother's recurred to him, as he pictured Joyce in her little, short, lilac frock, with an apron, as he had seen her one morning, and her round white arms bare, as she came out of the dairy, and said she had made up twenty pats of butter while he had been asleep. Surely George Herbert's words were verified. The action was made fine by the spirit, which was done as a loving token of obedience to the will of another. "Mother wished me to do it, so I got up an hour earlier," she had said, as she cut a slice from one of the rolls made for breakfast and offered it to him, spread with the butter she had made, with a cup of milk, before it had been skimmed. Dreams of first love are very sweet; and Gilbert wondered if he had been wise to leave Fair Acres without getting a definite answer from Joyce herself. Honourable and straightforward, he determined not to return to Fair Acres unless prepared to ask her father's permission to lay all he had at her feet. He was conscious that at present that _all_ did not imply much, and besides, he had his mother to think of, and he must not marry till he was really in a position to support a wife in that station of life to which he had been called. He could wait for seven years, like Jacob of old--waiting for Joyce was worth any sacrifice. But what if, when she emerged from her retirement and went to Barley Wood, some one else might set his heart on the prize and win it. Then he recalled her words, spoken in answer to his question as he carried her towards home the evening before: "No; I will not forget you."