tied my horse to a tree, crept up that nut-walk—­you know it?—­and round by the east terrace to the porch, and laid my valentine on the door-step, and clanged the bell, and hid behind the yew-fence till the man came out to get it.  Then I went home.  And last thing at night there was a clatter-clatter at the door at Redford, and I dashed out to catch whoever it was—­her brother she sent—­but wasn’t quite smart enough.  If only I’d seen him.  I should have known—­as I ought to have, without that; but I didn’t.  It never occurred to me that she’d send the answer so soon, and she had disguised her writing in the address, and there was another girl—­name of Myrtle Vining—­who used to have myrtle on her note-paper, and all over the place—­and here these flowers looked to me as if they were meant for myrtle, and these two crossed arrows are like capital V—­and how I came to be such an egregious dolt, Lord only knows!  Well, I’ve paid for it—­that I have—­I’ve paid for it.  Look here—­don’t touch!  I’ll show you what I found out when it was too late—­after she’d played shy with me till I got angry and left her, and it was all over—­my eyes aren’t good enough to see it now, but I suppose it’s there still—­”

With infinite care and the small blade of his pocket-knife, he lifted the tiny tip of a tiny Cupid’s wing.  With bent head and puckered eyelids, Guthrie peered under, and read:  “Yours, M. C.,” written on a space of paper hardly larger than a pin’s head.

“In my valentine that night,” said Mr Pennycuick, “I’d asked her to have me.  I didn’t hide it up in this way; I knew, while I wondered that she took no notice, that she must have seen it.  This was her answer.  And I never got it, sir, till she was married to another man—­and then by the merest accident.  Then I couldn’t even have the satisfaction of telling her that I’d got it, and how it was I hadn’t got it before.  Of course, I wasn’t going to upset her after she was married to another man.  I’ve had to let her think what she liked of me.”

Guthrie was certainly interested now, but not as interested as he would have been the day before.  The day before, this story would have moved him to pour out the tale of his own untimely and irreparable loss.  He and old Mr Pennycuick would—­metaphorically speaking—­have mingled their tears together.

“You forget, off and on,” said Mr Pennycuick, as he wrapped up his treasure with shaking hands and excessive care—­“perhaps for years at a time, while you are at work and full of affairs; but it comes back—­especially when you are old and lonely, and you think how different your life might have been.  You don’t know anything about these things yet.  Perhaps, when you are an old man like me, you will.”

Guthrie did know—­no one better, he believed.  But he did not say.  Unknown to himself, he had reached that stage which Mr Pennycuick came to when he began courting Sally Dimsdale, who had made him such a good and faithful (and uninteresting) wife.