I will find an opportunity to speak to Annie this very afternoon.  She is likely to be less busy to-day than at other times.  I need not trouble much as to how I shall tell her.  She is sure to listen to me in a sweet, bewildered silence.  She will have no temptation to laugh at the most beautiful and sacred of earthly themes.  There is, to my mind, something incurably frivolous about a woman who laughs when a man is in earnest.  I have tried over and over again to impress this upon Catherine, but it never had any other effect but to increase her amusement.  She is a young woman entirely without the bump of veneration, and this, I should say, far more than an elegant pronunciation, is the desideratum in a wife.

Sunday evening.  I am in the mental condition of “Truthful James.”  I ask myself:  “Do I wake?  Do I dream?” I inquire at set intervals whether the Caucasian is played out?  So far as I represent the race, I am compelled to reply in the affirmative.  This is what has happened.  I was smoking my post-prandial cigar in the terraced garden, lying back in a comfortable basket-chair fetched out from the sitting-room, when a shadow fell upon the grass, and Mrs. Anderson appeared in her walking things to know if there was anything I was likely to want, as she and “Faaether” and the little boys were just starting for H’Orton.

“Don’t trouble about me,” said I; “go and enjoy yourself.  No one better deserves it than you, Mrs. Anderson.”  And I add diplomatically:  “Doesn’t Miss Annie also go with you?”

“Annie’s over Fuller’s Farm way,” says the good woman smiling; and I smile too, for no particular reason.  “She mostly walks up there of a Sunday afternoon.”

I know Fuller’s Farm.  I have passed it in my rambles.  You skirt the copse, cross the sunny upland field, drop over the stile to the right, and find yourself in Fuller’s Lane.  The farm is a little further on, a comfortable homestead, smaller than Down End, but built of the same grey, lichened stone, and with the same steep roof and dormer windows.

I gave the Andersons ten minutes start, then rose, unlatched the gate, and followed Annie.  I reached the upland field.  It was dotted with sheep:  ewes and lambs; long shadows sloped across it; a girl stood at the further gate.  This was Annie, but alas! someone was with her; a loutish figure that I at first took to be that of son Robert.  But as I came nearer, I saw it was not Robert but his equally loutish friend, the young fellow I had seen working with him by the threshing machine.  That day, in his working clothes, he had looked what he was, a strong and honest young farmer.  To-day, in his Sunday broadcloth, with a brilliant blue neck scarf, a brass horseshoe pin, and a large bunch of primroses in his button-hole, he looked a blot, an excrescence, on the sunny earth.  Personally, he might have been tall, but for a pronounced stoop; fair, but that he was burnt brick colour; smooth-faced, but for the multitude of lines and furrows, resulting from long exposure to the open air.  His voice I couldn’t help admitting was melodious and manly, yet the moment he caught sight of me he shuffled his feet like an idiot, and blushed like a girl.  He whispered something to his companion, dropped over the stile like a stone from a catapult, and vanished from view.