There is not anything else to say, except that I should be
happier if you did not go on writing. Nothing can change me,
and it only keeps open old thoughts."

He wrote in answer to that a furiously angry, altogether unpleasant
letter. Joan read it with shrinking horror, it seemed to lay bare all
that she had been only half aware of before, the ugliness, the smallness
of what she had at first thought was love.

"If you try to marry anyone else," the letter ended on a
cruelly ugly note, "remember I can spoil your little game for
you, Joan. There is no man who will marry you when they learn
the truth."

She tore up his other letters after that; the very sight of his
handwriting brought hot shame to her heart.

How much the people of the house noticed she hardly knew. Aunt Janet
had fallen into the habit of watching her covertly, pathetically; she
was trying in her own way to read the secret hidden away behind a
changed Joan. But she did her best to keep her curiosity out of sight;
she was very gentle, very anxious to divert Joan's thoughts and keep her
happy.

Uncle John, of course, noticed nothing. Joan helped him to potter about
in the garden--they were building a rookery down by the woods--or
sometimes she would take him for long walks and he would stump along
beside her wrapped in indifferent silence, or else, carried away by some
reminiscence of the old days, would start talking about the regiment and
the places where he had been stationed. It was only Miss Abercrombie
that Joan was really uneasy with, and the end of Miss Abercrombie's
visit was in sight.

One afternoon, on a day which had seen one of Gilbert's unopened letters
destroyed, Joan and Miss Abercrombie started out together soon after tea
to take a basin of jelly to one of Aunt Janet's pet invalids who lived
in a cottage away out at what was called the Four Cross Roads.

It was one of those very fine blue days common to September. Just a nip
of cold in the air, the forerunner of winter, and overhead the leaves on
the trees turning all their various reds and golds for autumn.

"The sky gives one a great sense of distance this afternoon," Miss
Abercrombie said presently. "You never see a sky like this in towns;
that is why you get into the habit of thinking things out of
proportion."

"What makes you say that?" asked Joan; "I mean, how does the distance of
the sky affect it?"

"Oh, well, it makes one feel small," th