what's the matter with you?" cried the blonde, who had
watched the pantomime with open mouth and growing eyes.

Lina turned and looked at her thoughtfully a moment, and then said with
decisiveness:--

"You just go to Nell's, my dear, and say I 'm coming pretty soon; and if
you say anything else, I 'll--I 'll never marry you."

The girls were in the habit of doing as Lina wanted them to, and the
blonde went, pouting with unappeased curiosity.

To gain exit from the Seminary was a simple matter in these lax days,
and five minutes later Lina was walking rapidly along the highway, her
lips firm set, but her eyes apprehensively reconnoitring the road ahead,
with frequent glances to each side and behind. Once she got over the
stone wall at the roadside in a considerable panic and crouched in the
dewy grass while a belated villager passed, but it was without further
adventure that she finally turned into the road leading behind Mr.
Steele's lot, and after a brief search identified the garden where she
remembered seeing some particularly fine melons, when out walking a day
or two previous. There they lay, just the other side the fence, faintly
visible in the dim light She could not help congratulating herself,
by the way, on the excellent behavior of her nerves, whose tense,
fine-strung condition was a positive luxury, and she then and there
understood how men might delight in desperate risks for the mere sake
of the exalted and supreme sense of perfect self-possession that danger
brings to some natures. Not, indeed, that she stopped to indulge any
psychological speculations. The coast was clear; not a footfall or
hoof-stroke sounded from the road, and without delay she began to look
about for a wide place between the rails where she might get through.
Just as she found it, she was startled by an unmistakable human snore,
which seemed to come from a patch of high corn close to the melons, and
she was fairly puzzled until she observed, about ten rods distant in the
same line, an open attic window. That explained its origin, and with a
passing self-congratulation that she had made up her mind not to marry
a man that snored, she began to crawl through the fence. When halfway
through the thought struck her,--wasn't it like any other stealing,
after all? This crawling between rails seemed dreadfully so. Her
attitude, squeezed between two rails and half across the lower one, was
neither graceful nor comfortable, and perhaps that