It was half
past eight.

"We'll have to hurry," she said. "When I told you pop and I didn't
always agree about everything I was thinking--"

"Is it about a man?" he asked, surmising the worst and steeling himself
for the blow if it must fall. He would show her how generously
chivalrous a man could be toward a girl who honored him with her
confidence and appealed for his assistance.

"It would be a long story," she said sadly, "and there isn't time to
tell it, but the moment I saw you were so big and brave and strong, I
thought you might help."

To be called big and brave and strong by so charming a person, to enjoy
her confidence and be her chosen aid in an hour of need and perplexity
profoundly touched him. He wished that Isabel could have heard Sally's
tribute to his strength and courage--Isabel who had said only a few days
ago that he wouldn't kill a flea. He had always been too modest and too
timid, just as Isabel had said, but those days were passed and the man
Isabel knew was very different from the man who sat beside Bill Walker's
daughter under the glowing Vermont stars. Drums were beating and bugles
sounding across the hills as he waited for Sally to send him into the
lists with her colors flying from his spear.

"I wouldn't trust the Governor; he's too friendly with pop for that.
It's just this way," she went on dreamily. "There's a young man, Abijah
Strong, who owns a farm just a little way down the road. He and I have
been in love with each other ever since we went to school together,
really and truly lovers. He was at college when I was, so I know him
very well. But pop doesn't like him, and when he found how matters stood
he refused to allow me to see him any more. And he's been very hard
about it. We've been waiting for a chance to run away and get married. I
met him last night in the lane and everything's arranged for us to leave
tonight, run into Brattleboro and be married there and then go on to
Boston and wait till pop's disposed to be reasonable."

"He will be very angry, of course," said Archie, his ardor somewhat
chilled now that he knew the nature of the project in which she asked
his cooperation.

"Yes; pop will be perfectly crazy," she affirmed with a lingering
intonation that seemed to imply a certain joy in the prospective
disturbance of her parent's equilibrium. "He wants me to marry a
preacher at Saxby Center who's almost as old as pop, and has three grown
children. I thought maybe