lty and
wanted to confess. Besides that the need to give advice was strong
upon her, and the natural desire to interfere in a matter of the heart
was another impelling impulse. So she had determined to speak for
conscience, for friendship, for duty, and it is not beyond the bounds
of possibility, for curiosity.

But it was a hard subject to approach, and she was uncomfortable.
Diplomacy had not been one of the gifts the fairies gave her when they
gathered at her cradle. Looking at the quivering needles she tried to
think of a good beginning, and like most direct and candid people
concluded there was no better one than that of the initial fact, before
the complicating intrusion of inference:

"I woke up in the middle of the night last night."

Lucy knit unmoved.

"The moonlight was as bright as day. Out beyond the shadow where my
tent was I could see the weeds and little bunches of grass."

"How could you see them when you were in your tent?" This without
stopping her work or raising her head.

Susan, feeling more uncomfortable than ever, answered, her voice
instinctively dropping, "I got up and looked out of my tent."

She kept her eyes on the busy hands and saw that the speed of their
movements slackened.

"Got up and looked out? What did you do that for?"

The time for revelation had come. Susan was a little breathless.

"I heard people whispering," she said.

The hands came to a stop. But the knitter continued to hold them in
the same position, a suspended, waiting expectancy in their attitude.

"Whispering?" she said. "Who was it?"

"Oh, Lucy, you know."

There was a pause. Then Lucy dropped her knitting and, raising her
head, looked at the anxious face opposite. Her eyes were quiet and
steady, but their look was changed from its usual frankness by a new
defiance, hard and wary.

"No, I don't know. How should I?"

"Why, why"--Susan now was not only breathless but pleading--"it was
you."

"Who was me?"

"The woman--Lucy don't look at me like that, as if you didn't
understand. I saw you, you and Zavier, wrapped in the blanket. You
walked out into the moonlight and I _saw_."

Lucy's gaze continued unfaltering and growing harder. Under the
freckles she paled, but she stood her ground.

"What do you mean? Saw me and Zavier? Where?"

"Under the trees first and then you went out into the moonlight with
the blanket wrapped round your shoulders."

"You didn't see me," the hardne