“Oh, yes, you are!  If worrying would do any good—­” she shook her head at him reproachfully.

Claude took hold of the fence pickets between them with both hands.  “It will do good!  Didn’t I tell you there was missionary work to be done right here?  Is that why you’ve been so stand-offish with me the last few years, because you thought I was an atheist?”

“I never, you know, liked Ernest Havel,” she murmured.

When Claude left the mill and started homeward he felt that he had found something which would help him through the summer.  How fortunate he had been to come upon Enid alone and talk to her without interruption,—­without once seeing Mrs. Royce’s face, always masked in powder, peering at him from behind a drawn blind.  Mrs. Royce had always looked old, even long ago when she used to come into church with her little girls,—­a tiny woman in tiny high-heeled shoes and a big hat with nodding plumes, her black dress covered with bugles and jet that glittered and rattled and made her seem hard on the outside, like an insect.

Yes, he must see to it that Enid went about and saw more of other people.  She was too much with her mother, and with her own thoughts.  Flowers and foreign missions—­her garden and the great kingdom of China; there was something unusual and touching about her preoccupations.  Something quite charming, too.  Women ought to be religious; faith was the natural fragrance of their minds.  The more incredible the things they believed, the more lovely was the act of belief.  To him the story of “Paradise Lost” was as mythical as the “Odyssey”; yet when his mother read it aloud to him, it was not only beautiful but true.  A woman who didn’t have holy thoughts about mysterious things far away would be prosaic and commonplace, like a man.

III

During the next few weeks Claude often ran his car down to the mill house on a pleasant evening and coaxed Enid to go into Frankfort with him and sit through a moving picture show, or to drive to a neighbouring town.  The advantage of this form of companionship was that it did not put too great a strain upon one’s conversational powers.  Enid could be admirably silent, and she was never embarrassed by either silence or speech.  She was cool and sure of herself under any circumstances, and that was one reason why she drove a car so well,—­much better than Claude, indeed.

One Sunday, when they met after church, she told Claude that she wanted to go to Hastings to do some shopping, and they arranged that he should take her on Tuesday in his father’s big car.  The town was about seventy miles to the northeast and, from Frankfort, it was an inconvenient trip by rail.

On Tuesday morning Claude reached the mill house just as the sun was rising over the damp fields.  Enid was on the front porch waiting for him, wearing a blanket coat over her spring suit.  She ran down to the gate and slipped into the seat beside him.