‘Oh, how wet you are!’ she cried, in pitying dismay; ’and you’ve hardly got over your fever!  Oh, Mr Holdsworth, I am so sorry!’ He turned his head a little, smiling at her.

’If I do catch cold, it is all my fault for having deluded you into staying out here!’ but she only murmured again, ’I am so sorry.’  The minister spoke now.  ’It is a regular downpour.  Please God that the hay is saved!  But there is no likelihood of its ceasing, and I had better go home at once, and send you all some wraps; umbrellas will not be safe with yonder thunder and lightning.’

Both Holdsworth and I offered to go instead of him; but he was resolved, although perhaps it would have been wiser if Holdsworth, wet as he already was, had kept himself in exercise.  As he moved off, Phillis crept out, and could see on to the storm-swept heath.  Part of Holdsworth’s apparatus still remained exposed to all the rain.  Before we could have any warning, she had rushed out of the shelter and collected the various things, and brought them back in triumph to where we crouched.  Holdsworth had stood up, uncertain whether to go to her assistance or not.  She came running back, her long lovely hair floating and dripping, her eyes glad and bright, and her colour freshened to a glow of health by the exercise and the rain.

‘Now, Miss Holman, that’s what I call wilful,’ said Holdsworth, as she gave them to him.  ‘No, I won’t thank you’ (his looks were thanking her all the time).  ’My little bit of dampness annoyed you, because you thought I had got wet in your service; so you were determined to make me as uncomfortable as you were yourself.  It was an unchristian piece of revenge!’

His tone of badinage (as the French call it) would have been palpable enough to any one accustomed to the world; but Phillis was not, and it distressed or rather bewildered her.  ‘Unchristian’ had to her a very serious meaning; it was not a word to be used lightly; and though she did not exactly understand what wrong it was that she was accused of doing, she was evidently desirous to throw off the imputation.  At first her earnestness to disclaim unkind motives amused Holdsworth; while his light continuance of the joke perplexed her still more; but at last he said something gravely, and in too low a tone for me to hear, which made her all at once become silent, and called out her blushes.  After a while, the minister came back, a moving mass of shawls, cloaks, and umbrellas.  Phillis kept very close to her father’s side on our return to the farm.  She appeared to me to be shrinking away from Holdsworth, while he had not the slightest variation in his manner from what it usually was in his graver moods; kind, protecting, and thoughtful towards her.  Of course, there was a great commotion about our wet clothes; but I name the little events of that evening now because I wondered at the time what he had said in that low voice to silence Phillis so effectually, and because,