lp me get him out." Charlotte's purpose was high
if she did slightly mix her theology.

That night a wonderful thing happened in my moonlit room. I was dead
asleep when I felt a soft hand stroking my face, and then my hair, and I
awoke to find the Stray standing by my bed.

"They tied me in bed when they found out I had runned away in the
mornings to see you, but I gnawed the rope that he put, because I wanted
to tell you that I can go to the big school when it opens because
Minister told him that he would be put in jail if I didn't. It is a law.
I heard him last night, and mother cried a long time, for what, I don't
know. Was she glad or sorry? Do you know?"

"No, darling, I don't know, and I wish I did," I answered him as I put
my arms around him while he snuggled his black-crested head down beside
mine on the pillow.

"My mother is sick, she cries so much," he said with a manly struggle
that drowned the sob in his throat. "I don't know what to do. Do you
know?"

"I'll find out," I said with a sudden fierceness as I strained him
against my shoulder for an instant and then sat up in bed as if I must
do something at once.

"I must run right back and tie myself before he wakes up and whips me,"
the Stray said, and it sickened me to see him wrap the gnawed rope
around his little arm.

"No!" I exclaimed, and held out my arms to him.

"I must, but I don't mind whippings if I can read books in school and
you make mother not cry," and before I could stop him he ran out of the
dim room and I could hear his cautious bare feet patter down the long
stairway and hall.

That moonlight tryst was the last of the adventure, but I did not worry,
for I knew that the school would be opened formally in ten days, and I
had laid my plans for Stray in an interested friendship with the very
competent young woman who had already come down from the state normal
college to teach the amalgamated young ideas of Goodloets to shoot.
Also, I had vague plans that hurt me, of getting Jessie or Harriet to
continue the trysts for me after the wedding, whose details they were
all pushing to completion by a mid-September day.

And added to the strenuosity of the laying of my plans for at least a
year's absence, I had to help father make his arrangements for a six
months' stay in Washington, for he had accepted the President's
appointment on the Commerce Commission, and night and day he was at his
library desk. The silver-topped decanter still