He is striding onwards, lost in miserable thought, when suddenly footsteps, coming quickly towards him, rouse him.  Someone is laughing.  The laughter strikes to his very soul.  When people laugh seldom, one always knows their laugh.  Before Tom Hescott turns the corner Rylton knows it is his.  But his companion!

“Why, there you are, Rylton!” says Colonel Neilson at the top of his voice.  “By Jove! well met!  We’ve been disputing about a point in the tenant right down here, and you can set us straight!”

Rylton can hardly account to himself for the terrible revulsion of feeling he endures at this moment.  Is it joy? Can it be joy?  What is she to him or he to her?  Yet positively it is a most thankful joy he feels as he sees these two men approaching him together.  After all, Minnie Hescott had been right.  It is perhaps worthy of notice that he does not say to himself that Marian Bethune had been wrong!

He sets Colonel Neilson straight on a point or two, and then goes on again, striking now, however, into a pathway that leads him very far from the farm he had proposed to visit.  It opens out into a pleasant little green sward dotted with trees, through which the sun glints delicately.  One of these trees is a gnarled old oak.

As Rylton steps into this open glade the oak attracts him.  He looks at it—­first carelessly, and then with sharp interest.  What strange fruit is that hanging on it?  A foot!—­an exquisite little slipper!

He stands still, and looks higher; and there he sees Tita embedded amongst the leaves, half reclining on a giant bough and reading.  The book is on her knees, her eyes upon her book.

CHAPTER XX.

HOW TITA TAKES HIGH GROUND, AND HOW SHE BRINGS HER HUSBAND, OF ALL PEOPLE, TO HER FEET.

She looks like a little elf.  All at once the pretty beauty of her breaks upon Rylton.  The reaction from such extreme doubt of her to a clear certainty has made his appreciation of her kinder—­has, perhaps, opened his eyes to the perfections she possesses.  However this may be, there is, beyond question, a great deal of remorse in his soul as he walks towards the tree in which she sits enshrined.

How will she receive him?  Not a word, save those much-begrudged ones at breakfast, has passed between them since last night; and this hurrying away from the others, does it not mean a dislike to meet him?

“You have mounted very high in the world!” says he, stopping beneath the tree and addressing her.

He has come towards her very softly on the grass—­so softly that she has not heard his coming.  And now, as he speaks, she starts violently, and looks down at him as if surprised out of all measure.  In a second, however, she recovers herself.

“True!” says she; “I have married you!”

It is to be still war, then!  Rylton bites his lips, but controls himself.  It is plain he is not forgiven.  But, after all, she has had something to forgive, and more—­far more than she even knows.  That last suspicion of her was base.