However, Lucina from that day on improved.  She took up her little tasks; she seemed quite as formerly, only, possibly, somewhat older and more staid.

The Squire thought that her recovery was due to a certain bitter medicine which Doctor Prescott had given her, and often extolled it to his wife.  “It is singular that medicine should work like a flash of lightning after she had been taking it for weeks with no effect,” thought Abigail, but she said nothing.

One afternoon, not long after her talk with Colonel Lamson, Lucina met Jerome face to face in the road, and stopped and held out her hand to him.  “How do you do?” she said, paling and blushing, and yet with a sweet confidence which was new in her manner.

Jerome bowed low, but did not offer his hand.  She held out hers persistently.

“I can’t shake hands,” he said, “mine is stained with leather; it smells of it, too.”

“I am not afraid of leather,” Lucina returned, gently.

“I am,” Jerome said, with a defiance in which there was no bitterness.  Then, as Lucina still looked at him and held out her hand, with an indescribable air of pretty, childish insistence and womanly pleading, her blue eyes being sober almost to tears, he motioned her to wait a moment, and swung over the fence and down the road-side, which was just there precipitous, to the brook-bed.  He got down on his knees, plunged his hands into the water, like a golden net-work in the afternoon light, washed his hands well, and returned to Lucina.  She laid her little hand in his, but she shook her head, smiling.  “I liked it better the other way,” said she.

“I couldn’t touch your hand with mine like that.”

“You would give me more if you let me give you something sometimes,” said Lucina, with a pretty, sphinx-like look at him as she drew her hand away.

Jerome wondered what she had meant after they had separated.  Acute as he was, and of more masterly mind than she, he was at a loss, for she had touched that fixed idea which sways us all to greater or less degree and some to delusion.  Jerome, with his one principle of giving, could not even grasp a problem which involved taking.

He puzzled much over it, then decided, not with that lenient slighting, as in other cases when womankind had vexed him with blind words, but with a fond reverence, as for some angelic mystery, that it was because Lucina was a girl.  “Maybe girls are given to talking in that riddlesome kind of way,” thought Jerome.

He was blissfully certain upon one point, at all events.  Lucina’s whole manner had given evidence to a confidence and understanding upon her part.

“She knows what I am doing,” he told himself.  “She knows how I am working, and she is contented and willing to wait.  She knows, but she isn’t bound.”  Jerome had not dreamed that Lucina’s indisposition had had aught to do with distress of mind upon his account.