“Mother planted that a long while ago, when she first moved here.  She is very partial to wistaria.  I’m afraid we’ll lose it, one of these hard winters.”

“Oh, that would be a shame!  Take good care of it.  You must put in a lot of time looking after these things, anyway.”  He spoke admiringly.

Enid leaned against the fence and pushed back her little bonnet.  “Perhaps I take more interest in flowers than I do in people.  I often envy you, Claude; you have so many interests.”

He coloured.  “I?  Good gracious, I don’t have many!  I’m an awfully discontented sort of fellow.  I didn’t care about going to school until I had to stop, and then I was sore because I couldn’t go back.  I guess I’ve been sulking about it all winter.”

She looked at him with quiet astonishment.  “I don’t see why you should be discontented; you’re so free.”

“Well, aren’t you free, too?”

“Not to do what I want to.  The only thing I really want to do is to go out to China and help Carrie in her work.  Mother thinks I’m not strong enough.  But Carrie was never very strong here.  She is better in China, and I think I might be.”

Claude felt concern.  He had not seen Enid since the sleigh-ride, when she had been gayer than usual.  Now she seemed sunk in lassitude.  “You must get over such notions, Enid.  You don’t want to go wandering off alone like that.  It makes people queer.  Isn’t there plenty of missionary work to be done right here?”

She sighed.  “That’s what everybody says.  But we all of us have a chance, if we’ll take it.  Out there they haven’t.  It’s terrible to think of all those millions that live and die in darkness.”

Claude glanced up at the sombre mill house, hidden in cedars,—­then off at the bright, dusty fields.  He felt as if he were a little to blame for Enid’s melancholy.  He hadn’t been very neighbourly this last year.  “People can live in darkness here, too, unless they fight it.  Look at me.  I told you I’ve been moping all winter.  We all feel friendly enough, but we go plodding on and never get together.  You and I are old friends, and yet we hardly ever see each other.  Mother says you’ve been promising for two years to run up and have a visit with her.  Why don’t you come?  It would please her.”

“Then I will.  I’ve always been fond of your mother.”  She paused a moment, absently twisting the strings of her bonnet, then twitched it from her head with a quick movement and looked at him squarely in the bright light.  “Claude, you haven’t really become a free-thinker, have you?”

He laughed outright.  “Why, what made you think I had?”

“Everybody knows Ernest Havel is, and people say you and he read that kind of books together.”

“Has that got anything to do with our being friends?”

“Yes, it has.  I couldn’t feel the same confidence in you.  I’ve worried about it a good deal.”

“Well, you just cut it out.  For one thing, I’m not worth it,” he said quickly.