to make atonement, I even offered to show him a spot where he
might try again, lower down the stream.

He would not hear of it; he entreated me to go home and change my
wet dress. I cared nothing for the wetting, but I obeyed him
without knowing why.

He walked with me. My way back to the Vicarage was his way back
to the inn. He had come to our parts, he told me, for the quiet
and retirement as much as for the fishing. He had noticed me once
or twice from the window of his room at the inn. He asked if I
were not the vicar's daughter.

I set him right. I told him that the vicar had married my
mother's sister, and that the two had been father and mother to
me since the death of my parents. He asked if he might venture to
call on Doctor Starkweather the next day, mentioning the name of
a friend of his, with whom he believed the vicar to be
acquainted. I invited him to visit us, as if it had been my
house; I was spell-bound under his eyes and under his voice. I
had fancied, honestly fancied, myself to have been in love often
and often before this time. Never in any other man's company had
I felt as I now felt in the presence of _this_ man. Night seemed
to fall suddenly over the evening landscape when he left me. I
leaned against the Vic arage gate. I could not breathe, I could
not think; my heart fluttered as if it would fly out of my
bosom--and all this for a stranger! I burned with shame; but oh,
in spite of it all, I was so happy!

And now, when little more than a few weeks had passed since that