For a short season John Egerton experienced an uncomfortable sensation that he was not acting just rightly. This was at Thanksgiving time, when he paid his first visit to Toronto. As the train whirled him northward again, through the sunlit spaces of brown earth and blue sky, he told himself positively that he had gone too far with the little village belle, and that he must hereafter walk more circumspectly. For when he had found himself once more in the stately home of the woman he loved, and Helen, tall and beautiful, had swept into the spacious drawing-room to greet him, he realised, for the first time, what a difference lay between the queenly young woman of society and the simple little country girl who had been absorbing such a dangerously large amount of his time and thoughts. Helen, so composed, so elegantly poised, so thoroughly at home in the best social circles of the city, would be a perfect companion for him, one in every way suited to take her place at his side in the brilliant career he had mapped out for himself. Jessie would have looked out of place, he feared, in Helen's elegant home. But when he returned, and met the Glenoro girl coming down the northern hill, her nut-brown curls dancing in the wind, her cheeks crimson from its caress, her eyes as clear and radiant as the river which flashed before her, he was forced to admit that Jessie was as perfectly in accord with her surroundings as Helen had been in the flower-scented drawing-room. He was bewildered. Was it possible, he asked himself, for a man to have two natures, quite distinct in tastes? He worried himself almost to distraction over the question; but as there was no one to answer it, he drove it from his mind by spending the evening at the Hamiltons' teaching Jessie to play chess. And so the autumn passed very merrily for the minister of Glenoro, disturbed only by occasional doubts as to his course, until, with the opening of winter, came the Christmas holidays and Donald Neil. Duncan Polite's heart grew happy again under his boy's sunny presence. Donald's deep regret at the disappointment he was causing his best friend made him assiduous in his attentions to Duncan. He spent so much of his time at the old shanty on the hill that the old man's cares were for the time forgotten.