g to meeting to-night with you
and your mother." And all the long mile of sandy roadway that lay
between the mill and Rockhaven was traversed in almost unbroken silence.

Though far apart as yet, they were nearer to one another than ever
before.

CHAPTER XXI

THE MOOD OF THE BELLS

There were two church bells on Rockhaven, one at each village, and every
Sunday evening, year in and out, they called the piously inclined
together, always at the same time. That at Northaven sounded the sweeter
to Winn, since its call came over a mile of still water, like an echo to
the one in Rockhaven. He had noticed them, one answering the other, many
times before, each time to return in thought to the hillside home where
he was born and to the same sweet sound that came on Sunday from the
village two miles away. It had been to him what seemed long years since
he heard them, yet now, this evening, while he waited in the little
porch of Mona's home for her and her mother to join him churchward, and
this call came sweetly through the still evening air, it carried a new
peace to his vexed spirit, and the threatened upset of his mission to
Rockhaven faded away. Once more he was a boy again, and for a time
without a care.

And when Mona appeared, dressed in a simple white muslin, a white hood
of knitted wool half hiding the coiled masses of her jet black hair, her
eyes filled with tender light, Winn, in spite of his moroseness and the
bitter lessons in love he had learned, felt it a proud privilege to walk
beside her.

The usual number, mostly womankind, were emerging from the scattered
houses along the way to the church, and as Winn and Mona, together with
her mother and Mrs. Moore, followed the one plank walk which led to the
church, the last call of the bells came at longer intervals.

When the church was reached the lamps had been lighted, but the white
headstones, dotting the upward slope just back of it, still showed
faintly in the twilight.

The services were simple as usual, the few dozen who gathered all joined
in the same hymns of praise their ancestors had sung in the same church.
What the minister said was not new or eloquent; and yet the prayer he
uttered seemed to Winn to contain an unusually touching strain. It was
the mood of the bells still on him, for he had never known what church
believers call a change of heart; and while the devotions of the people
were pathetic in their very simplicity, they seemed more