er again to
the little camp under the rock beneath the stars.

"He remembered still! He cared!" This was what her glad thoughts sang as
the car whirled on, and her gay companions forgot her and chattered of
their frivolities.

"How wonderful that I should find his mother!" she said again and again
to herself. Yet it was not so wonderful. He had told her the name of the
town, and she might have come here any time of her own accord. But it
was strange and beautiful that the accident had brought her straight to
the door of the house where he had been born and brought up! What a
beautiful, happy boyhood he must have had with a mother like that! Hazel
found herself thinking wistfully, out of the emptiness of her own
motherless girlhood. Yes, she would go back and see the sweet mother
some day; and she fell to planning how it could be.

XI

REFUGE

Milton Hamar had not troubled Hazel all summer. From time to time her
father mentioned him as being connected with business enterprises, and
it was openly spoken of now that a divorce had been granted him, and his
former wife was soon to marry again. All this, however, was most
distasteful to the girl to whom the slightest word about the man served
to bring up the hateful scene of the desert.

But early in the fall he appeared among them again, assuming his old
friendly attitude towards the whole family, dropping in to lunch or
dinner whenever it suited his fancy. He seemed to choose to forget what
had passed between Hazel and himself, to act as though it had not been,
and resumed his former playful attitude of extreme interest in the girl
of whom he had always been fond. Hazel, however, found a certain air of
proprietorship in his gaze, a too-open expression of his admiration
which was offensive. She could not forget, try as hard as she might for
her father's sake to forgive. She shrank away from the man's company,
avoided him whenever possible, and at last when he seemed to be almost
omnipresent, and growing every day more insistent in his attentions, she
cast about her for some absorbing interest which would take her out of
his sphere.

Then a strange fancy took her in its possession.

It was in the middle of the night when it came to her, where she had
been turning her luxurious pillow for two hours trying in vain to tempt
a drowsiness that would not come, and she arose at once and wrote a
brief and businesslike letter to the landlord of the little New
Hampsh