!"

Fitzpiers recognized her as Suke Damson, a hoydenish damsel of the
hamlet, who was plainly mistaking him for her lover. He was
impulsively disposed to profit by her error, and as soon as she began
racing away he started in pursuit.

On she went under the boughs, now in light, now in shade, looking over
her shoulder at him every few moments and kissing her hand; but so
cunningly dodging about among the trees and moon-shades that she never
allowed him to get dangerously near her. Thus they ran and doubled,
Fitzpiers warming with the chase, till the sound of their companions
had quite died away. He began to lose hope of ever overtaking her,
when all at once, by way of encouragement, she turned to a fence in
which there was a stile and leaped over it. Outside the scene was a
changed one--a meadow, where the half-made hay lay about in heaps, in
the uninterrupted shine of the now high moon.

Fitzpiers saw in a moment that, having taken to open ground, she had
placed herself at his mercy, and he promptly vaulted over after her.
She flitted a little way down the mead, when all at once her light form
disappeared as if it had sunk into the earth. She had buried herself in
one of the hay-cocks.

Fitzpiers, now thoroughly excited, was not going to let her escape him
thus. He approached, and set about turning over the heaps one by one.
As soon as he paused, tantalized and puzzled, he was directed anew by
an imitative kiss which came from her hiding-place, and by snatches of
a local ballad in the smallest voice she could assume:

"O come in from the foggy, foggy dew."

In a minute or two he uncovered her.

"Oh, 'tis not Tim!" said she, burying her face.

Fitzpiers, however, disregarded her resistance by reason of its
mildness, stooped and imprinted the purposed kiss, then sunk down on
the next hay-cock, panting with his race.

"Whom do you mean by Tim?" he asked, presently.

"My young man, Tim Tangs," said she.

"Now, honor bright, did you really think it was he?"

"I did at first."

"But you didn't at last?"

"I didn't at last."

"Do you much mind that it was not?"

"No," she answered, slyly.

Fitzpiers did not pursue his questioning. In the moonlight Suke looked
very beautiful, the scratches and blemishes incidental to her out-door
occupation being invisible under these pale rays. While they remain
silent the coarse whir of the eternal night-jar burst sarcastically
from the top of a tree at th