Dr. Maclean looked gravely at the two fine-looking young people standing before him in the lamplight.

Harry Garlett had never looked his age, and now, to-night, he looked years younger than yesterday. As for Jean, not only her radiant face, but her supple, graceful figure seemed transfigured—she looked a lovely ageless nymph no sorrow or decay could touch.

“I fancy that even you would mind being spied on and sniggered at,” said the doctor dryly.

And so there began for those two who loved one another so dearly a strange period of mingled pain and bliss. They hated to be apart, and yet they were not allowed to be together in what seemed to them both the only seemly, natural way—that in their joint everyday work.

Mrs. Maclean showed what even Jean considered an almost absurd fear of what even the people of Terriford might say. She did not like the lovers to stray outside the large garden and paddock of Bonnie Doon, and she ordained that “for the present” the engagement should remain private.

Small wonder that at the end of about ten days Miss Prince asked inquisitively: “Why has Jean left off going to the factory?”

“Jean has only had a few days’ holiday since she first went there,” answered Jean’s aunt evasively.

But Miss Prince shook her head. “I don’t know why you should hide the truth from me, Mrs. Maclean? It’s been plain for a good while what was the matter with Harry Garlett. I knew it before he knew it himself! But I didn’t believe that the girl liked him. I thought she preferred Dr. Tasker. Well, well! Poor Emily has soon been forgotten——”

After some three weeks of this state of things had gone on, Dr. Maclean suddenly said to his wife: “There’s nothing 55for it but to get them married! There’ll only be more talk if they don’t.”

55

And Mrs. Maclean answered with something like a groan: “There’ll be a lot of talk if they do.”

“Yes, but what’s to be done, my dear? The poor fellow has never been in love till now, so he doesn’t know how to behave——”

And so it was that at last it was decided that the two should be married on the nineteenth of December, by special license, very quietly, not to say secretly, in Terriford village church. They would then go to London for a week’s honeymoon, and, during that 

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