With that Elmira gave a great start, though not wholly of surprise; for the imagination of a maid can, at the stimulus of a horse’s feet, encompass nearly all realities within her dreams.  Then she looked up, and Doctor Prescott’s son Lawrence was bending over from his saddle and smiling into her pink face in her pink sunbonnet.

“Good-day,” she returned, softly, and courtesied with a dip of her pink skirts into a white foam of little way-side weedy flowers, and then held her pink sun-bonnet slanted downward, and would not look again into the young man’s eager face.

“It is a full year since I have seen you, and not a glimpse of your face did I get this time, and yet I knew, the minute I came in sight of you, who it was,” said he, gayly; still, there was a loving and wistful intonation in his voice.

“Small compliment to me,” returned Elmira, with a pretty spirit, though she kept her pink bonnet slanted, “to know me by a gown and bonnet I have had eight years.”

“But ’twas your gown and bonnet,” said the young man, and Elmira trembled and took an uneven step, though she strove to walk in a dignified manner beside Lawrence Prescott on his bay mare.  The mare was a spirited creature, and he had hard work to rein her into a walk.  “Let me take your bundle,” he said.

“It is not heavy,” said she, but yielded it to him.

Lawrence Prescott was small and slight, but held himself in the saddle with a stately air.  He was physically like his father, but his mother’s smile parted his fine-cut lips, and her expression was in his blue eyes.

Upham people had not seen much of Lawrence since he was a child, for he had been away at a preparatory school before entering college, and many of his vacations had not been spent at home.  Now he was come home to study medicine with his father and prepare to follow in his footsteps of life.  The general opinion was that he would never be as smart.  Many there were, even of those who had come in sore measure under Doctor Seth Prescott’s autocratic thumb, who held in dismay the prospect of the transference of his sway to his son.

“Guess you’ll see how this town will go down when the old doctor’s gone and the young one’s here in his place,” they said.  It is the people who make tyranny possible.

“How far are you going?” asked Lawrence, of Elmira flitting along beside his dancing mare.

“Oh, a little way,” said she, evasively.

“How far?” There was something of his father’s insistence in Lawrence’s voice.

“To Granby,” replied Elmira then, and tried to speak on unconcernedly.  She was ashamed to let him know how far she had planned to walk because of her poverty.

“Granby!” cried Lawrence, with a whistle of astonishment; “why, that is seven miles farther!  You are not going to walk to Granby and back to day?”

“I like to walk,” said Elmira, timidly.

“Why, but it is a warm day, and you are breathing short now.”  Lawrence pulled the mare up with a sharp whoa.  “Now I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said.  “You sit down here on that stone and rest, and I’ll ride back home and put the mare into the chaise, and I’ll drive you over there.”