she sobbed, with an angry stamp of her
foot. "I--I want to go ho-ome!"

"Well, I reckon there ain't anybody holdin' you," said Thomas Jefferson
brutally. He was intent on fixing the sixth worm on the hook in such
fashion as permanently to discourage the bait thief, and was coming to
his own in the matter of self-possession with grateful facility. It was
going to be notably easy to bully her--another point of difference
between her and Nan Bryerson.

"I know there isn't anybody holding me, but--but I can't find the way."

That any one could be lost within an easy mile of the manor-house was
ridiculously incredible to Thomas Jefferson. Yet there was no telling,
in the case of a girl.

"You want me to show you the way?" he asked, putting all the
ungraciousness he could muster into the query.

"You might tell me, I should think! I've walked and walked!"

"I reckon I'd better take you; you might get lost again," he said, with
gloomy sarcasm. Then he consumed all the time he could for the
methodical disposal of his fishing-tackle. It would be good for her to
learn that she must wait on his motions.

She waited patiently, sitting on the ground with one arm around the neck
of the Great Dane; and when Thomas Jefferson stole a glance at her to
see how she was taking it, she looked so tired and thin and woebegone
that he almost let the better part of him get the upper hand. That made
him surlier than ever when he finally recovered his string of fish from
the stream and said: "Well, come on, if you're comin'."

He told himself, hypocritically, that it was only to show her what
hardships she would have to face if she should try to tag him, that he
dragged her such a weary round over the hills and through the worst
brier patches and across and across the creek, doubling and circling
until the easy mile was spun out into three uncommonly difficult ones.
But at bottom the motive was purely wicked. In all the range of sentient
creatures there is none so innately and barbarously cruel as the human
boy-child; and this was the first time Thomas Jefferson had ever had a
helplessly pliable subject.

The better she kept up, the more determined he became to break her down;
but at the very last, when she stumbled and fell in an old leaf bed and
cried for sheer weariness, he relented enough to say: "I reckon you'll
know better than to go projectin' round in the woods the next time. Come
on--we're 'most there, now."

But Ardea's troub