His dog had "pointed" her.

"It's exceedingly impolite to point to anything you want," said Golly.

Touched by this, and overcome by a strange emotion, John Gale turned away and went to Canada.

Slight as the incident was, it showed that inborn chivalry to women, that desire for the Perfect Life, that intense eagerness to incarnate Christianity in modern society, which afterward distinguished him.

Golly loved him! For all that, she still remained a "tomboy" as she was,--robbing orchards, mimicking tramps and policemen, buttering the stairs and the steps of houses, tying kettles to dogs' tails, and marching in a white jersey, with the curate's hat on, through the streets of the village.
"Gol dern my skin!" said the dear old clergyman, as he tried to emerge from a surplice which Golly had stitched together; "what spirits the child DO have!" Yet everybody loved her! And when John Gale returned from Canada, and looked into her big blue eyes one day at church, small wonder that he immediately went off again to Paris, and an extended Continental sojourn, with a serious leaning to theology! Golly bore his absence meekly but characteristically; got a boat, disported like a duck in the water, attempted to elope with a boy appropriately named Drake, but encountered a half gale at sea and a whole Gale in John on a yacht, who rescued them both.