the road. It was loss of
time wandering in the woods, skirting thicket and marsh, forced ever and
again to return to the beaten track. She thought, also, that she must be
safe, so far was she now from Fair View. How could they guess that she was
gone to the mountains?

About midday, two men on horseback looked at her in passing. One spoke to
the other, and turning their horses they put after and overtook her. He
who had spoken touched her with the butt of his whip. "Ecod!" he
exclaimed. "It's the lass we saw run for a guinea last May Day at
Jamestown! Why so far from home, light o' heels?"

A wild leap of her heart, a singing in her ears, and Audrey clutched at
safety.

"I be Joan, the smith's daughter," she said stolidly. "I niver ran for a
guinea. I niver saw a guinea. I be going an errand for feyther."

"Ecod, then!" said the other man. "You're on a wrong scent. 'Twas no dolt
that ran that day!"

The man who had touched her laughed. "'Facks, you are right, Tom! But I'd
ha' sworn 't was that brown girl. Go your ways on your errand for
'feyther'!" As he spoke, being of an amorous turn, he stooped from his
saddle and kissed her. Audrey, since she was at that time not Audrey at
all, but Joan, the smith's daughter, took the salute as stolidly as she
had spoken. The two men rode away, and the second said to the first: "A
Williamsburgh man told me that the girl who won the guinea could speak and
look like a born lady. Didn't ye hear the story of how she went to the
Governor's ball, all tricked out, dancing, and making people think she was
some fine dame from Maryland maybe? And the next day she was scored in
church before all the town. I don't know as they put a white sheet on her,
but they say 't was no more than her deserts."

Audrey, left standing in the sunny road, retook her own countenance,
rubbed her cheek where the man's lips had touched it, and trembled like a
leaf. She was frightened, both at the encounter and because she could
make herself so like Joan,--Joan who lived near the crossroads ordinary,
and who had been whipped at the Court House.

Late that afternoon she came upon two or three rude dwellings clustered
about a mill. A knot of men, the miller in the midst, stood and gazed at
the mill-stream. They wore an angry look; and Audrey passed them hastily
by. At the farthest house she paused to beg a piece of bread; but the
woman who came to the door frowned and roughly bade her begone, and a
child thre