left the mill and started homeward he felt that he
had found something which would help him through the summer. How
fortunate he had been to come upon Enid alone and talk to her
without interruption,--without once seeing Mrs. Royce's face,
always masked in powder, peering at him from behind a drawn
blind. Mrs. Royce had always looked old, even long ago when she
used to come into church with her little girls,--a tiny woman in
tiny high-heeled shoes and a big hat with nodding plumes, her
black dress covered with bugles and jet that glittered and
rattled and made her seem hard on the outside, like an insect.

Yes, he must see to it that Enid went about and saw more of other
people. She was too much with her mother, and with her own
thoughts. Flowers and foreign missions--her garden and the great
kingdom of China; there was something unusual and touching about
her preoccupations. Something quite charming, too. Women ought to
be religious; faith was the natural fragrance of their minds. The
more incredible the things they believed, the more lovely was the
act of belief. To him the story of "Paradise Lost" was as
mythical as the "Odyssey"; yet when his mother read it aloud to
him, it was not only beautiful but true. A woman who didn't have
holy thoughts about mysterious things far away would be prosaic
and commonplace, like a man.

III

During the next few weeks Claude often ran his car down to the
mill house on a pleasant evening and coaxed Enid to go into
Frankfort with him and sit through a moving picture show, or to
drive to a neighbouring town. The advantage of this form of
companionship was that it did not put too great a strain upon
one's conversational powers. Enid could be admirably silent, and
she was never embarrassed by either silence or speech. She was
cool and sure of herself under any circumstances, and that was
one reason why she drove a car so well,--much better than Claude,
indeed.

One Sunday, when they met after church, she told Claude that she
wanted to go to Hastings to do some shopping, and they arranged
that he should take her on Tuesday in his father's big car. The
town was about seventy miles to the northeast and, from
Frankfort, it was an inconvenient trip by rail.

On Tuesday morning Claude reached the mill house just as the sun
was rising over the damp fields. Enid was on the front porch
waiting for him, wearing a blanket coat over her spring suit. She
ran down to the gate and slipped