One year and one year only at the Church Social, after the singing of “Auld Lang Syne,” a young man approached Laura and said, bowing gravely as was the custom, “May I have the pleasure of seeing you home?” This caused quite a sensation among those immediately surrounding the pair, for the young man was the reporter for the local newspaper and so looked upon as an outsider at such gatherings. His predecessor had sat about with a bored air, between his dashes out to the “Golden Lion,” and once, when invited to join hands in the final singing, had refused and stood aloof in a corner scribbling in his note-book. But he was a middle-aged man and inclined to give himself airs. This new reporter, who had appeared for the first time at Candleford Green that evening, was only a year or two older than Laura, and he had joined in the games and laughed and shouted as loudly as anybody. He had nice blue eyes and an infectious laugh, and, of course, the note-book in which he scribbled shorthand notes was also attractive to Laura. So, when he asked her if he might see her home, she was delighted to murmur the conventional “That would be very kind of you.”

As they circled the green in the mild, damp air of the winter night, he told Laura about himself. He had only left school a few months before and was being given a month’s trial by the Editor of the Candleford News. The month of trial was almost over and he would be leaving Candleford in a day or two, not because he had proved unsatisfactory—at least he hoped not—but because a much better opening had now been found for him by his parents on a newspaper in his home town, far up in the midlands. “After that, Fleet Street, I suppose?” suggested Laura, and they both laughed at that as an excellent joke and agreed that they both felt they must have met before at some time, somewhere. Then they had to discuss the party they had come from and to laugh at some of the oddities there. Which was wrong of Laura, who had been carefully trained never to make fun of the absent. The only excuse that can be found for her is that it was the first time she met any one from the outside world near her own age and upon anything like equal terms, and that may have gone to her head a little.