, a
friendly little brook it was--just such a ribbon of water as a girl like
Sally would fancy for a chum.

"We must have a drink or you won't know how sweet and cool the water
is!" She cupped her hands and drank; but his own efforts to bring the
water to his lips were clumsy and ineffectual.

"Oh you!" she laughed. "Let me show you!"

Drinking from her hands was an experience that transcended for the
moment all other experiences. If this was a rural approach to a
flirtation, Miss Seebrook's methods were much safer, and the garden of
the Cornford tavern a far more circumspect stage than a Vermont
brookside shut off from all the world.

He had decided to avoid any reference to the secrets of the underground
trail, but his delicacy received a violent shock a moment later, when
they were seated on a bench beside the brook.

"Do you know," she said, "you are not like the others?"

"I don't understand," he faltered.

"Oh, cut it out! You needn't try to fool me! When I told you awhile ago
I thought you were nice, I meant more than that; I meant that you didn't
at all seem like the crooks that sneak through here and hide at our
house. You're more like the Governor, and I never understand about the
Governor. It doesn't seem possible that any one who isn't forced by
necessity into crime would ever follow the life. Now you're a gentleman,
any one could tell that, but I suppose you've really done something
pretty bad or you wouldn't be here! Now I'm going to hand it to you
straight; that's the only way."

"Certainly, Miss Walker; I want you to be perfectly frank with me."

"Well, my advice would be to give yourself up, do your time like a man
and then live straight. You're young enough to begin all over again and
you might make something of yourself. The Governor has romantic ideas
about the great game but that's no reason why you should walk the thorny
road. Now pop would kill me if he knew I was talking this way. It's a
funny thing about pop. All I know about him I just picked up a little at
a time, and he and ma never wanted me to know. Ma's awful nervous about
so many of the boys stopping here, for she hung on to pop all the time
he was shooting up trains out West, and having a husband in the
penitentiary isn't a pleasant thing to think about. Ma's father ran a
saloon down in Missouri; that's how she got acquainted with pop, but ma
was always on the square, and they both wanted me brought up right. It
was ma's idea