omething really came to pass, she
remembered, and she scanned the sky for threatening clouds. Ah, if it
should rain to-morrow and the leaden hours should drag by in that odious
house! After having indulged a ray of hope, such a prospect seemed
unbearable.

In her role of trusty she had constrained herself to civility. She had
taken Mrs. Carder the flowers last night, and Rufus had put some tiny
blooms in his buttonhole and caressed them at supper-time with
significant glances at her.

When she awoke on the following day her first move was to the window
with an anxious look at the sky. As soon as she was satisfied that it
was not threatening, a reaction set in to her thought. She always
hastened to dress in the morning, for her compassion for Mrs. Carder
made her hurry to her assistance. Pete's eyes in this few days had taken
on a seeing look and he worked with energy to follow every direction of
his golden-haired goddess. In the kitchen he did not avoid her eyes, and
the smiles he received from her were the only sunbeams that had ever
come into his life.

She was in many minds that morning about going again to the meadow. It
seemed so absurd, so humiliating to costume herself as for private
theatricals, and to go repeatedly to keep a tryst which the other party,
and that a man, had forgotten.

Would the princess in the fairy tale do so? she wondered; but then if
she had not persisted the story could never have been written.

"Ain't you sick o' that meadow and the cows?" asked Rufus at the
dinner-table. "Hadn't you better go drivin' to-day? I've got an errand
to the village and just as lieve do it myself as send one o' the men if
you'll go."

Geraldine, the two braids of her hair brought up around her head in a
golden wreath that rested on fluffy waves, was looking more than usually
appealing, he thought, and he congratulated himself on the restraint
with which he was allowing her mind to work on the proposition he had
made to her. She was evidently becoming more normal, finding herself as
it were. Those flashes of red and white that had passed across her face
in her intensity of feeling had ceased. Her voice was steady and civil.

"The meadow seems to agree with me," she answered. "Why should my not
going with you prevent you from doing your errand at the village?"

Why, indeed? thought Carder, regarding her. She had no money, she was in
a part of the world strange to her. If she again strolled forth arrayed
i