his highest ideal of woman, and still occasionally composed a few verses to her memory, regretting, perhaps, the cooling of his poetic ardour.  Then he had gradually lost sight of her in the hard work which made up his life.  Profound study had made him more prosaic and he believed that he had done with ideals for ever, after the manner of many clever young fellows who at one and twenty feel that they are separated from the follies of eighteen by a great and impassable gulf.  The gulf, however, was not in John’s case so wide nor so deep but what, at the prospect of being suddenly brought face to face, and made acquainted, with her who for so long had seemed the object of a romantic passion, he felt a strange thrill of surprise and embarrassment.  Those meetings of later years generally bring painful disillusion.  How many of us can remember some fair-haired little girl who in our childhood represented to us the very incarnation of feminine grace and beauty, for whom we fetched and carried, for whom we bound nosegays on the heath and stole apples from the orchard and climbed upon the table after desert, if we were left alone in the dining-room, to lay hands on some beautiful sweetmeat wrapped in tinsel and fringes of pink paper—­have we not met her again in after-life, a grown woman, very, very far from our ideal of feminine grace and beauty?  And still in spite of changes in herself and ourselves there has clung to her memory through all those years enough of romance to make our heart beat a little faster at the prospect of suddenly meeting her, enough to make us wonder a little regretfully if she was at all like the little golden-haired child we loved long ago.

But with John the feeling was stronger than that.  It was but two years and a half since he had seen Mrs. Goddard, and, not even knowing her name, had erected for her a pedestal in his boyish heart.  There was moreover about her a mystery still unsolved.  There was something odd and strange in her one visit to the vicarage, in the fact that the vicar had never referred to that visit and, lastly, it seemed unlike Mr. Ambrose to have said nothing of her settlement in Billingsfield in the course of all the letters he had written to John since the latter had left him.  John dwelt upon the name—­Goddard—­but it held no association for him.  It was not at all like the names he had given her in his imagination.  He wondered what she would be like and he felt nervously anxious to meet her.  Somehow, too, what he heard of the squire did not please him; he felt an immediate antagonism to Mr. Juxon, to his books, to his amateur scholarship, even to his appearance as described by Mrs. Ambrose, who said he was such a thorough Englishman and wondered how he kept his hair so smooth.