“I see you are takin’ a few nubbins for the old cow,” said Squire Rawson, one afternoon as Gordon started off, at which Gordon blushed as red as the cherries he was carrying.  It was just what he had been doing.

“Well, that is the way to ketch the calf,” said the old farmer, jovially; “but I ’low the mammy is used to pretty high feedin’.”  He had seen Mrs. Yorke driving along in much richer attire than usually dazzled the eyes of the Ridge neighborhood, and had gauged her with a shrewd eye.

Miss Alice Yorke’s sprain turned out to be less serious than had been expected.  She herself had proved a much less refractory patient than her mother had ever known her.

It does not take two young people of opposite sexes long to overcome the formalities which convention has fixed among their seniors, especially when one of them has brought the other down a mountain-side in his arms.

Often, in a sheltered corner of the long verandah, Keith read to Alice on balmy afternoons, or in the moonlit evenings sauntered with her through the fields of their limited experience, and quoted snatches from his chosen favorites, poems that lived in his heart, and fancied her the “maid of the downward look and sidelong glance.”

Thus, by the time Alice Yorke was able to move about again, she and Keith had already reached a footing where they had told each other a good deal of their past, and were finding the present very pleasant, and one of them, at least, was beginning, when he turned his eyes to the future, to catch the glimmer of a very rosy light.

It showed in his appearance, in his face, where a new expression of a more definite ambition and a higher resolution was beginning to take its place.

Dr. Balsam noted it, and when he met Gordon he began to have a quizzical light in his deep-gray eyes.  He had, too, a tender tone in his voice when he addressed the girl.  Perhaps, a vision came to him at times of another country lad, well-born like this one, and, like this one, poor, wandering on the New England hills with another young girl, primmer, perhaps, and less sophisticated than this little maiden, who had come from the westward to spend a brief holiday on the banks of the Piscataqua, and had come into his life never to depart—­of his dreams and his hopes; of his struggles to achieve the education which would make him worthy of her; and then of the overthrow of all:  of darkness and exile and wanderings.

When the Doctor sat on his porch of an evening, with his pipe, looking out over the sloping hills, sometimes his face grew almost melancholy.  Had he not been intended for other things than this exile?  Abigail Brooke had never married, he knew.  What might have happened had he gone back?  And when he next saw Alice Yorke there would be a softer tone in his voice, and he would talk a deeper and higher philosophy to her than she had ever heard, belittling the gaudy rewards of life, and instilling in her mind ideas of something loftier and better and finer than they.  He even told her once something of the story of his life, and of the suffering and sorrow that had been visited upon the victims of a foolish pride and a selfish ambition.  Though he did not confide to her that it was of himself he spoke, the girl’s instinct instantly told her that it was his own experience that he related, and her interest was deeply excited.