rywhere. I could not bear it
any longer; and I thought I would just be quiet and wait for
the day. Only--so far my wits served me yet--I must once more
cross the road; for the moon was sinking westward now, and the
level rays came in about my feet.'

'I thought I could not do it at first,' she said, with a voice
that told more than the words,--'go out into that stream of
light; but then I did; and hid myself in the branches of a
great hemlock, and waited there.'

'And then I found Mr. Rollo,--and I knew that I might trust
him.'

With which most unconscious full-sized compliment, the girl
crossed her arms upon her lap, and laid her face down upon
them, and was still.

'How did she found you?' demanded Mr. Falkirk with
unceremonious energy. The answer was in an undertone:

'I found her.'

Mr. Falkirk was silent again.

'No,' said Wych Hazel, without raising her head, and again not
stopping to measure her words. 'You would have stood there
till this time, if I had not spoken!'

'Would I?' said Rollo.

'And how came you to be there at all at that time of night?'
said Mr. Falkirk.

'On my way from the cars.'

'Cars, where?'

'Henderson.'

'Walk from Henderson!' said Mr. Falkirk.

'Save time. I wanted to be here to-day.' The answers were all
short and grave, as a man speaks who has no words that he
wants to say.

'And Mr. Rollo thought', said Hazel, looking up, 'that it was
better for me to come home from Dr. Maryland's than from the
woods. And--when he spoke of it--I supposed you would say that
too, Mr. Falkirk.'

But Mr. Falkirk vouchsafed no corroboration of this opinion.

'Did I do well, sir?' she said a little eagerly, but meaning
now the whole night's work. 'Did I do ill? Was I a bit like
your old ideal--"a woman" and "brave"? Or was I only a girl,
and very foolish?' They were so silent, these men!--it tried
her. Did they, in their worldly wisdom, see any better way out
of her hard places, than her seventeen years' inexperience had
found, at such a cost? The brown eyes looked searchingly at
Mr. Falkirk, and again for an instant went beyond him to Mr.
Rollo.

'Answer, Mr. Falkirk!' said the younger man.

'My dear,' said Wych Hazel's guardian, 'if I had been a
quarter as much a man as you have proved yourself a woman,
your bravery never would have been so tried.'

'And the bravery was as much as the womanliness!' said the
other, in the short, terse way of all his words this
afternoon; no