Unconscious of the embarrassment she had caused in these several masculine minds, the Swedish lady named Anna led the party onward, continuing her agricultural lecture.  William walked mechanically, his eyes averted and looking at no one.  And throughout this agony he was burningly conscious of the blasphemed presence of Miss Pratt beside him.

Therefore, it was with no little surprise, when the party came out of the barn, that William beheld Miss Pratt, not walking at his side, but on the contrary, sitting too cozily with George Crooper upon a fallen tree at the edge of a peach-orchard just beyond the barn-yard.  It was Miss Parcher who had been walking beside him, for the truant couple had made their escape at the beginning of the Swedish lady’s discourse.

In vain William murmured to himself, “Flopit love ole friends best.”  Purple and black again descended upon his soul, for he could not disguise from himself the damnatory fact that George had flitted with the lady, while he, wretched William, had been permitted to take care of the dog!

A spark of dignity still burned within him.  He strode to the barn-yard fence, and, leaning over it, dropped Flopit rather brusquely at his mistress’s feet.  Then, without a word even without a look—­William walked haughtily away, continuing his stern progress straight through the barn-yard gate, and thence onward until he found himself in solitude upon the far side of a smoke-house, where his hauteur vanished.

Here, in the shade of a great walnut-tree which sheltered the little building, he gave way—­not to tears, certainly, but to faint murmurings and little heavings under impulses as ancient as young love itself.  It is to be supposed that William considered his condition a lonely one, but if all the seventeen-year-olds who have known such halfhours could have shown themselves to him then, he would have fled from the mere horror of billions.  Alas! he considered his sufferings a new invention in the world, and there was now inspired in his breast a monologue so eloquently bitter that it might deserve some such title as A Passion Beside the Smoke-house.  During the little time that William spent in this sequestration he passed through phases of emotion which would have kept an older man busy for weeks and left him wrecked at the end of them.

William’s final mood was one of beautiful resignation with a kick in it; that is, he nobly gave her up to George and added irresistibly that George was a big, fat lummox!  Painting pictures, such as the billions of other young sufferers before him have painted, William saw himself a sad, gentle old bachelor at the family fireside, sometimes making the sacrifice of his reputation so that she and the children might never know the truth about George; and he gave himself the solace of a fierce scene or two with George:  “Remember, it is for them, not you—­you thing!”