"Thanks, if you will. Good night."
So Jack turned in once more in the old familiar bed in the old familiar room at the corner of the house, with windows overlooking a wide sweep of the rolling Cotswold Hills.
Next morning after church he met Mrs Bevengton and Bessie; she coloured slightly as she shook hands with him, and her dimples sprang into prominent evidence in a smile that expressed more than pleasure.
Jack regarded her thoughtfully, with very great pleasure too. She seemed the personification of beauty, not so much in the physical as the moral sense; as he walked by her side slowly down the brown-gravel path in the warm light of an autumn sun, countless little incidents of his childhood's days returned to him, bearing a fuller and a newer meaning; this girl had always been clean, clean as it is understood in England, honest and unspiteful, she never cheated. When he parted at the gate it was with a distinct sense of pleasure that he was to meet her again in the afternoon. She laughed, a jolly, happy laugh, when he explained the discolouration of his eye.
Mrs Carstairs and Mrs Bevengton coming behind had observed them with mutual approval: "Don't you think Bessie's improved?" Jack's mother said to him as they walked home together.
"She's better looking if that's what you mean, otherwise she was always a jolly decent girl."
"Yes, there are not many girls like her."
"In that, mater, your opinion should be of considerably more value than mine, I haven't met very many girls."
"You're getting old enough to think about these things now."
"Yes, mater, to think about them."