is just conceived idea the force which always
carried through her plans. "Do go! I feel so grateful to these men I
don't want one of them to walk a step!"

Sylvia had thought of a solitary walk, longing intensely for
isolation, and she did not at all welcome the suggestion of adapting
herself to a stranger. The stranger, on his part, looked a very
unchivalrous hesitation; but this proved to be only a doubt of
Sylvia's capacity as a walker.

"If you don't mind climbing a bit, I can take you over the gap between
Hemlock and Windward Mountain and make a bee-line for Lydford. It's
not an hour from here, that way, but it's ten miles around by the
road--and hot and dusty too."

"Can she _climb_!" ejaculated Molly scornfully, impatient to be off
with her men. "She went up to Prospect Rock in forty minutes."

She high-handedly assumed that everything was settled as she wished
it, and running towards the car, called with an easy geniality to the
group of men, starting down the road on foot, "Here, wait a minute,
folks, I'll take you back!"

She mounted the car, started the engine, waved her hand to the two
behind her, and was off.

The lean, stooping man looked dubiously at Sylvia. "You're sure you
don't mind a little climb?" he said.

"Oh no, I like it," she said listlessly. The moment for her was of
stale, wearied return to real life, to the actual world which she was
continually finding uglier than she hoped. The recollection of Felix
Morrison came back to her in a bitter tide.

"All ready?" asked her companion, mopping his forehead with a very
dirty handkerchief.

"All ready," she said and turned, with a hanging head, to follow him.

CHAPTER XXVII

BETWEEN WINDWARD AND HEMLOCK MOUNTAINS

For a time as they plodded up the steep wood-road, overgrown with
ferns and rank grass, with dense green walls of beech and oak saplings
on either side, what few desultory remarks they exchanged related to
Molly, she being literally the only topic of common knowledge between
them. Sylvia, automatically responding to her deep-lying impulse to
give pleasure, to be pleasing, made an effort to overcome her somber
lassitude and spoke of Molly's miraculous competence in dealing with
the fire. Her companion said that of course Molly hadn't made all that
up out of her head on the spur of the moment. After spending every
summer of her life in Lydford, it would be surprising if so energetic
a child as Molly hadn't assimilated t