rossing, and he had left the child behind.
Tearing off her apron, she threw it over her head. She ran to the door,
and, opening it, almost knocked the child down, in her haste to be out
and away. Rosie had lifted her frosty face in a smile of welcome, but
Amelia did not see it. She gathered the child in her arms, and hurried
down the steps, through the bars, and along the narrow path toward the
pine woods. The sharp brown stubble of the field merged into the thin
grasses of the greener lowland, and she heard the trickling of the
little dark brook, where gentians lived in the fall, and where, still
earlier, the cardinal flower and forget-me-not crowded in lavish color.
She knew every inch of the way; her feet had an intelligence of their
own. The farm was a part of her inherited life; but at that moment, she
prized it as nothing beside that newly discovered wealth which she was
rushing to cast away. Rosie had not striven in the least against her
capture. She knew too much of life, in some patient fashion, to resist
it, in any of its phases. She put her arms about Amelia's neck, to cling
the closer, and Amelia, turning her face while she staggered on, set her
lips passionately to the little sleeve.

"You cold?" asked she--"_dear_?" But she told herself it was a kiss of
farewell.

She stepped deftly over the low stone wall into the Marden woods, and
took the slippery downward path, over pine needles. Sometimes a rounded
root lay above the surface, and she stumbled on it; but the child only
tightened her grasp. Amelia walked and ran with the prescience of those
without fear; for her eyes were unseeing, and her thoughts hurrying
forward, she depicted to herself the little drama at its close. She
would be at the Crossing and away again, before the train came in;
nobody need guess her trouble. Enoch must be there, waiting. She would
drop the child at his side,--the child he had deserted,--and before he
could say a word, turn back to her desolate home. And at the thought,
she kissed the little sleeve again, and thought how good it would be if
she could only be there again, though alone, in the shielding walls of
her house, and the parting were over and done. She felt her breath come
chokingly.

"You'll have to walk a minute," she whispered, setting the child down at
her side. "There's time enough. I can't hurry."

At that instant, she felt the slight warning of the ground beneath her
feet, shaken by another step, and saw, t