him. He bowed assent, and turned aside into one of the long
perspectives of bean-poles. The girls watched him until out of
sight.

"Well," said Vashti, "don't tell ME. But if there wasn't something
between him and that Mamie Mulrady, I don't know a jilted man when
I see him."

"Well, you needn't have let him SEE that you knew it, so that any
civility of ours would look as if we were ready to take up with her
leavings," responded Esther, astutely, as the girls reentered the
house.

Meantime, the unconscious object of their criticism walked sadly
down the old market-garden, whose rude outlines and homely details
he once clothed with the poetry of a sensitive man's first love.
Well, it was a common cabbage field and potato patch after all. In
his disgust he felt conscious of even the loss of that sense of
patronage and superiority which had invested his affection for a
girl of meaner condition. His self-respect was humiliated with his
love. The soil and dirt of those wretched cabbages had clung to
him, but not to her. It was she who had gone higher; it was he who
was left in the vulgar ruins of his misplaced passion.

He reached the bottom of the garden without observing any sign of
the lonely invalid. He looked up and down the cabbage rows, and
through the long perspective of pea-vines, without result. There
was a newer trail leading from a gap in the pines to the wooded
hollow, which undoubtedly intersected the little path that he and
Mamie had once followed from the high road. If the old man had