rudely. There was a serenity about the youth's expectation of an
answer which, proving that he had no thought of over-stepping good
manners, made it, at the same time, very difficult to withhold an
answer.

Bates turned annoyed. He had supposed everybody was within.

"What have you lost?" repeated the youth.

"Oh--" said Bates, prolonging the sound indefinitely. He was not
deceitful or quick at invention, and it seemed to him a manifest
absurdity to reply--"a girl." He approached the house, words hesitating
on his lips.

"My late partner's daughter," he observed, keeping wide of the mark,
"usually does the cooking."

"Married?" asked the young man rapidly.

"She?--No," said Bates, taken by surprise.

_"Young_ lady?" asked the other, with more interest. Bates was not
accustomed to consider his ward under his head.

"She is just a young girl about seventeen," he replied stiffly.

"Oh, halibaloo!" cried the youth joyously. "Why, stranger, I haven't set
eyes on a young lady these two months. I'd give a five dollar-bill this
minute, if I had it, to set eyes on her right here and now." He took his
pipe from his lips and clapped his hand upon his side with animation as
he spoke.

Bates regarded him with dull disfavour. He would himself have given more
than the sum mentioned to have compassed the same end, but for different
reasons, and his own reasons were so grave that the youth's frivolity
seemed to him doubly frivolous.

"I hope," he said coldly, "that she will come in soon." His eyes
wandered involuntarily up the hill as he spoke.

"Gone out walking, has she?" The youth's eyes followed in the same
direction. "Which way has she gone?"

"I don't know exactly which path she may have taken." Bates's words grew
more formal the harder he felt himself pressed.

"Path!" burst out the young man--_"Macadamised road,_ don't you mean?
There's about as much of one as the other on this here hill."

"I meant," said Bates, "that I didn't know where she was."

His trouble escaped somewhat with his voice as he said this with
irritation.

The youth looked at him curiously, and with some incipient sympathy.
After a minute's reflection he asked, touching his forehead:

"She ain't weak here, is she--like the _old_ lady?"

"Nothing of the sort," exclaimed Bates, indignantly. The bare idea cost
him a pang. Until this moment he had been angry with the girl; he was
still angry, but a slight modification took place. He felt