"So are you," rejoined Phyllis.
"Yes, I am," she replied steadily, yet a little shyly. She was more disturbed by this unexpected meeting than either of the other two were. It seemed to her that it must be inexpressibly painful to them both, and that it would be better for her to go away.
"Well, good-by," said Phyllis airily; "here is the gate. Open it for me, and shut it behind me, or we shall have your Scotch cattle in our glebe. We shall see you at the Rectory soon, Philip?"
Philip opened the gate, and he and Dorothy stood in silence watching her, until, as she turned a corner that would hide her from their sight, she looked round and kissed her hand to them.
"How pretty she is!" exclaimed Philip. It astonished him that he felt so little agitation upon seeing her for the first time. She was very pretty; very fair. "But if she be not fair for me, what care I how fair she be?" he said to himself, feeling the very spirit of Wither's old poem. The face beside him, not so faultless as Phyllis's, was more beautiful to him for its expression of almost timid sympathy with his supposed grief. Dorothy's eyes looked wistfully into his.
"I cannot understand how or why I loved her," he went on in a low tone. "I suppose it was because I grew up with the idea that she was to be my wife. Not at home, but at the Rectory she was always called my little wife. So it grew with my growth."
"It must have been a great sorrow to you," murmured Dorothy.
"It was the uprooting of a fancy, not a sorrow," he said; "I am thankful it was torn up like the weed it was. A weed! Yes; and it would have been a noxious weed, poisoning my whole life. It is compensation enough for losing the position for which Phyllis would have married me."
They walked on under the overarching trees, with the setting sun throwing long shadows before them as they moved side by side. A few fallen leaves lay upon the road, or whirled merrily around them in the evening wind.
"There is only one girl who is like my mother," he said suddenly, "and if I could hope to win her—if it was in years to come—if she would wait for me——"