nned me all day? Am
I----"

"There are the Tombses waiting at their gate," interrupted the son. The
aged pair had hurried away from the train on foot to have their house
open for Sister March.

"Yes," said Daphne, sweetly yielding herself to their charge, "John's
fierce driving has damaged a wheel, and we wont----"

"Go home till morning," said the delighted pastor with a tickled laugh
that drew from his wife a glance of fond disapproval.

John drove alone to a blacksmith shop and left his buggy there and his
horse at a stable. For the blacksmith lay across his doorsill "sick." He
had been mending rigs and shoeing critters since dawn, and had drunk
from a jug something he had thought was water and found--"it wusn't."

March sauntered off lazily to a corner where the lane led westward like
the pike, turned into it and ran at full speed.

With a warm face he came again into the main avenue at a point nearly
opposite the Halliday's cottage gate. General Halliday and the
Englishman were just going through it.

John turned toward the sun-setting at a dignified walk. "I'm a fool to
come out here," he thought. "But I must see at once what Jeff-Jack
thinks of my plan. Will he tell me the truth, or will he trick me as
they say he did Cornelius? O I must ask him, too, if he did that! I
can't help it if he is with her; I must see him. I don't want to see
her; at least that's not what I'm out here for. I'm done with her--for a
while; Heaven bless her!--but I must see him, so's to know what to
propose to mother."

The day was dying in exquisite beauty. Long bands of pale green light
widened up from the west. Along the hither slope of a ridge someone was
burning off his sedge-grass. The slender red lines of fire, beautiful
after passion's sort, but dimming the field's fine gold, were just
reaching the crest to die by a road-side. The objects of his search were
nowhere to be seen.

A short way off, on the left, lay a dense line of young cedars and
pines, nearly parallel with the turnpike. A footpath, much haunted in
term-time by Montrose girls, and leading ultimately to the rear of the
Academy grounds, lay in the clover-field beyond this thicket. John
mounted a fence and gazed far and near. Opposite him in the narrow belt
of evergreens was a scarcely noticeable opening, so deeply curved that
one would get almost through it before the view opened on the opposite
side. He leaped into the field, ran to this gap, burst into the