ust to take the
money and invest it without consultin' me. It's--well, it's like the
master in the Bible--the man who gave out the talents. . . . Only don't
wrap it in a napkin!" She laughed. "I don't even want to be told
_what_ you do with the money. I'd rather not be told, in fact.
I want to trust you."

"Why?"

She laughed again, this time more shyly. "'Trust is proof,'" she
answered, quoting the rustic adage. "You have given me some right to
make that proof, I think?"

Ah--to be sure--the letters! She must, of course, have received his
letter, along with 'Bias's, though this was her first allusion to it.
. . . Cai's brain worked in a whirl for some moments. She was offering
him a test; she was yielding upon honest and prudent conditions; she was
as good as inviting him to win her. . . . To do him justice, he had
never--never, at any rate, consciously--based his wooing on her wealth.
For aught he cared, she might continue to administer all she possessed.
The comforts of Rilla Farm may have helped to attract him, but herself
had been from the first the true spell.

He did not profess any knowledge of finance. A return of four per cent
on his own modest investments contented him, and he left these to Mr
Rogers.

"Ah!"

His mind had caught, of a sudden, at a really brilliant idea.

"I accept," said he firmly, looking Mrs Bosenna hard in the eyes, and
her eyes sank under his gaze.

"Hi! Heads!" sang out a voice, and simultaneously the ladder which
William Skin had been hauling aloft, came crashing down and struck the
flagged path scarcely two yards away.

A second later Cai had Mrs Bosenna in his arms. "You are not hurt?" he
gasped.

She disengaged herself with a half-hysterical laugh. "Hurt?
Am I? . . . No, of course I am not."

"The damned rope slipped," growled William Skin in explanation, from his
perch on the ladder under the eaves.

"Slipped?" Cai ran to the rope and examined it. "Of course it slipped,
you lubber!" He stepped back on the pathway and spoke up to Skin as he
would have talked on shipboard to a blundering seaman in the
cross-trees. "Ain't a slip-knot _made_ to slip? And when a man's fool
enough to tie one in place of a hitch--"

He cast off the rope, bent it around the rung with, as it seemed, one
turn of the hand, and with a jerk had it firm and true.

"Make way, up there!" he called.

"You're never going to--to risk yourself," protested Mrs Bosenna.

"Risk mys