“Pansy,” said Dent next afternoon, as they were in the woods together, “you have won my mother’s heart.”

“Oh, Dent,” she exclaimed, tears starting, “I was afraid she would not like me.  How could she like me, knowing me no better?”

“She doesn’t yet know that she likes you,” he replied, with his honest thinking and his honest speech, “but I can see that she trusts you and respects you; and with my mother everything else follows in time.”

“I was embarrassed.  I did myself such injustice.”

“It is something you never did any one else.”

He had been at work in his quarry on the vestiges of creation; the quarry lay at an outcrop of that northern hill overlooking the valley in which she lived.  Near by was a woodland, and she had come out for some work of her own in which he guided her.  They lay on the grass now side by side.

“I am working on the plan of our house, Pansy.  I expect to begin to build in the autumn.  I have chosen this spot for the site.  How do you like it?”

“I like it very well.  For one reason, I can always see the old place from it.”

“My father left his estate to be equally divided between Rowan and me.  Of course he could not divide the house; that goes to Rowan:  it is a good custom for this country as it was a good custom for our forefathers in England.  But I get an equivalent and am to build for myself on this part of the land:  my portion is over here.  You see we have always been divided only by a few fences and they do not divide at all.”

“The same plants grow on each side, Dent.”

“There is one thing I have to tell you.  If you are coming into our family, you ought to know it beforehand.  There is a shadow over our house.  It grows deeper every year and we do not know what it means.  That is, my mother and I do not know.  It is some secret in Rowan’s life.  He has never offered to tell us, and of course we have never asked him, and in fact mother and I have never even spoken to each other on the subject.”

It was the first time she had even seen sadness in his eyes; and she impulsively clasped his hand.  He returned the pressure and then their palms separated.  No franker sign of their love had ever passed between them.

He went on very gravely:  “Rowan was the most open nature I ever saw when he was a boy.  I remember this now.  I did not think of it then.  I believe he was the happiest.  You know we are all pantheists of some kind nowadays.  I could never see much difference between a living thing that stands rooted in the earth like a tree and a living thing whose destiny it is to move the foot perpetually over the earth, as man.  The union is as close in one case as in the other.  Do you remember the blind man of the New Testament who saw men as trees walking?  Rowan seemed to me, as I recall him now, to have risen out of the earth through my father and mother—­a growth