“Mr. Roger,” cried Belle, “you are coming on famously.  I didn’t know that you were inclined, hitherto, to put everything you liked in your mouth or pocket.  What escapes some people may have had.”

“I never said I liked you,” retorted the youth, with a touch of the broad repartee with which he was accustomed to hold his own among the girls in the country.

“No, but if I saw that you liked some one else I might be alarmed”—­and she looked mischievously toward Mildred.

For reasons inexplicable to himself, he fell into a sudden confusion at this sally.

With a warning glance at the incorrigible Belle, whose vital elements were frolic and nonsense, Mildred began talking to Mr. Atwood about the great hotel a few miles distant.

“Would you like to go there?” asked Roger after a little.

“No,” she said; “I have not the slightest wish to go there.”  Indeed there was nothing that she shrank from more than the chance of meeting those who had known her in the city.

Later in the day Susan said to her mother, with much satisfaction, “She’s not stuck up at all, and we might have found it out before.  I can’t go back to the kitchen and live in our old haphazard way.  I can see now that it wasn’t nice at all.”

“We’ll see,” said the politic Mrs. Atwood.  “We mustn’t drive father too fast.”

Roger felt that at last he was getting acquainted, and he looked forward to the long summer evening with much hope.  But nothing happened as he expected, for Mildred was silent and preoccupied at supper, and Mrs. Jocelyn appeared to have relapsed into her old depression.

Instead of going out in his buggy to spend the evening with one of his many favorites, as had been his custom, he took a book and sat down under a tree near the porch, so that he might join Mildred if she gave him any encouragement to do so.  Belle found him taciturn and far removed from his gay mood of the morning, and so at last left him in peace.

Sue was entertaining a rural admirer in the parlor, which was rarely used except on such momentous occasions, and all was propitious for a quiet talk with the object of his kindling interest.  His heart beat quickly as he saw her appear on the porch with her hat and shawl, but instead of noticing him she went rapidly by with bowed head and climbed an eminence near the house, from which there was an extended view to the southward.  He felt, as well as saw, that she wished to be alone, that he was not in her thoughts, that she was still as distant from him as he had ever imagined her to be.  The shadows deepened, the evening grew dusky, the stars came out, and yet she did not return.  For a long time he could see her outline as she sat on the hill top, and then it faded.  He knew she was in trouble, and found a vague pleasure in watching with her, in remaining within call should she be frightened, knowing, however, that there was little danger of this in quiet Forestville.  Still, the illusion that he was in some sense her protector pleased him in his sentimental mood, and in after years he often recalled this first faint foreshadowing of his lot.