It was by a great effort at control that he refrained from striking her. He spluttered for words. Confronted with her cool disdain, anger overcame him. He felt himself at an immense disadvantage. "You are impossible!" was all he could find to say. Prudence, thinking over the scene later, while leaning from her window with the night wind cooling her heated face, wondered what was wrong with herself that this spirit of antagonism should flame forth at the slightest provocation. Why could she not endure William, and suffer his little homilies with patience? Why should Agatha's constant fault-finding irritate her to the verge of desperation? If she were possessed of a vein of humour, she told herself, these things would merely afford amusement. But they did not amuse. They were slowly souring a naturally sweet disposition. Big tears welled in the blue eyes, hung for a space on her lashes, and fell like silver dew upon the rose-leaves beneath the sill--hot tears that sprang from the well of discontent which had its source in a vain longing for unattainable things. CHAPTER THIRTEEN. The troubles of youth are none the less real because to riper age they appear trivial in the retrospect. In the constant fret against the irksome restrictions of her life Prudence's sunny nature fought under unequal conditions, with the result that the sun suffered many an eclipse. In one of these depressed moods she wrote to Bobby to the effect that she felt unequal to holding out until he came home for good, and that if matters did not improve the desperation of the situation would drive her to elope with the curate. "The sole consideration which deters me," she added, "is that Jones is such an impossible name." "What's in a name?" Bobby wrote back airily. "You're safe, old girl, if you jib at a little thing like that." The curate, failing to meet Prudence alone and wearying of being fenced with, took a mean advantage of her at the annual Sunday-school treat, and secluding her in a corner of the playing-field with her class of infants, set the infants running races and came rather abruptly to his point. "I love to watch you with little children," he remarked with disconcerting suddenness. "You have such a wonderful sympathy with them." "I like children," she answered guardedly; and tried to gather the babies about her; but the curate was throwing sweets for them, and they preferred scrambling for these to clinging to teacher's hands. There is a time for everything. "So do I," he said, attentively scrutinising her averted face, and admiring the fine colour in her cheeks which a new quality in his voice had brought there. "Children in the home make home beautiful." He swept the field with his glance, and decided that his chance was short-lived and might not come again. He plunged desperately.