Sipping the cup of tea which his mother had handed to him, Dyce talked at large.  Nothing, he declared, was equal to the delight of leaving town just at this moment of the year, when hedge and meadow were donning their brightest garments and the sky gleamed with its purest blue.  He spoke in the tone of rapturous enjoyment, and yet one might have felt a doubt whether his sensibility was as keen as he professed or imagined; all the time, he appeared to be thinking of something else.  Most of his remarks were addressed to Miss Bride, and with that manner of intimate friendliness which he alone of the family used towards their visitor.  He inquired about the events of her life, and manifested a strong interest in the facts which Constance briefly repeated.

“Let me walk with you as far as the station,” he said, when the time came for her departure.

“Please don’t trouble,” Constance replied, with a quick glance at Mrs. Lashmar’s face, still resentful under the conventional smile.

Dyce, without more words, took his hat and accompanied her; the vicar went with them to the garden gate, courteous but obviously embarrassed.

“Pray remember me to your father, Miss Bride,” he said.  “I should much like to hear from him.”

“It’s chilly this evening,” remarked Dyce, as he and his companion walked briskly away.  “Are you going far?”

“To Hollingford.”

“But you’ll be travelling for two or three hours.  What about your dinner?”

“Oh, I shall eat something when I get home.”

“Women are absurd about food,” exclaimed Dyce, with laughing impatience.  “Most of you systematically starve yourselves, and wonder that you get all sorts of ailments.  Why wouldn’t you stay at the vicarage to-night?  I’m quite sure it would have made no difference if you had got back to Hollingford in the morning.”

“Perhaps not, but I don’t care much for staying at other people’s houses.”

Dyce examined his companion’s face.  She did not meet his look, and bore it with some uneasiness.  In the minds of both was a memory which would have accounted for much more constraint between them than apparently existed.  Six years ago, in the days of late summer, when Dyce Lashmar was spending his vacation at the vicarage, and Connie Bride was making ready to go out into the world, they had been wont to see a good deal of each other, and to exhaust the topics of the time in long conversations, tending ever to a closer intimacy of thought and sentiment.  The companionship was not very favourably regarded by Mr. Lashmar, and to the vicar’s wife was a source of angry apprehension.  There came the evening when Dyce and Constance had to bid each other good-bye, with no near prospect of renewing their talks and rambles together.  What might be in the girl’s thought, she alone knew; the young man, effusive in vein of friendship, seemed never to glance beyond a safe borderline, his emotions satisfied with intellectual communion.  At the moment of shaking hands, they stood in a field behind the vicarage; dusk was falling and the spot secluded.—­They parted, Constance in a bewilderment which was to last many a day; for Dyce had kissed her, and without a word was gone.