playmates. That is rare. The most that could be guessed about Eunice and
Henry before his leaving home was that he had been more inclined to talk
with her than with any other girls who came to the house, and as he, in
his cubhood, had a sniff of contempt for most girls, that counted for
very little. Perhaps, on second thoughts, it might be held to count for
a good deal.

When Henry had been home two summers ago, Eunice was away on one of her
rare visits to an aunt in Tewksbury--in a sense, at the world's end. So
Henry had rarely seen her since that peep she took at him long ago in
Memoryland. He had heard of her frequently, we will suppose, in the
letters from his sister Dora, and she of him from her chum.

Meanwhile, an important event had happened in her life. Old Edgar Carne,
Eunice's grandfather, had died a year ago, and left his orphan
grand-daughter at eighteen with the tiniest little fortune, equal to
probably twenty pounds a year. For a time it seemed likely that she
would leave the village and go to reside with her aunt at Tewksbury, as
she had now no blood relations in Hampton Bagot, though many
warm-hearted friends. Simple in her tastes, educated only to the extent
of a village curriculum, which did not breed ambition, fond of domestic
duties and the light work of a garden, Eunice had no clear-cut path
ahead, and would have preferred to stay on among the people who had been
planted around her by the hand of friendship.

It so fell out that Fate pinned her to Hampton yet awhile. The
housekeeper of the Rev. Godfrey Needham had left, and it was suggested
to him by Mr. Charles that Eunice and a young serving-maid would do
wonders in brightening up the vicarage, where an elderly housekeeper had
only fostered frowsiness. Besides, the vicar had recently to the
amazement of his parishioners, taken a little lass of nine to live with
him, the orphan child of a relation of his long-dead wife. Eunice could
thus be of double service to him in mothering the little one, and her
sympathy could be relied upon, since she herself had been robbed of a
mother's love so early. It was even whispered that the coming of little
Marjorie had something to do with the old housekeeper giving notice to
leave; she was "no hand wi' childer," as she herself confessed.

Mr. Needham fell in with Edward John's proposal; Eunice was delighted;
and a year had testified to its wisdom. The vicarage had never been so
bright in the memory of the old