themselves beside him as he advanced and with trembling hands
tried to unbar the door. This time he did not repulse them, and it was
well, for as the bolts slid and the heavy door was set free it fell
inward with such force that he would have been crushed beneath it had
they not been there to draw him out of its reach.

"Oh! oh! oh! The great horse chestnut!" cried Dorothy, springing aside
from contact with the branches which fell crowding through the
doorway. Hinges were torn from their places and the marvel was that
the beautifully carved door had not itself been broken in bits.

Jim was the first to rally and to find some comfort in the situation,
exclaiming:

"That's happened exactly as I feared it would, some day; and it's a
mercy there wasn't nobody sittin' on that piazza. They'd ha' been
killed dead, sure as pisen!"

"Killing generally does mean death, Jim Barlow, but if you knew that
splendid tree was bound to fall some day why didn't you say so? We--"
with a fine assumption of proprietorship in Deerhurst--"we would have
had it prevented," demanded Dorothy.

Already she felt that this was home; already she loved the fallen tree
almost as its mistress had done and her feeling was so sincere, if
new, that nobody smiled, and the lad answered soberly:

"I have told, Dolly girl. I kept on tellin' Mrs. Calvert how that
lily-pond she would have dug out deeper an' deeper, and made bigger
all the time, would for certain undermine that tree and make it fall.
But--but she's an old lady 't knows her own mind and don't allow
nobody else to know it for her! Old Hans, the gardener, he talked a
heap, too; begged her to have the pond cemented an' that wouldn't
hender the lilies blowin' and'd stop trouble. But, no. She wouldn't
listen. Said she 'liked things perfectly natural' and--Well, she's got
'em now!"

"Jim Barlow, you're--just horrid! and--ungrateful to my precious Aunt
Betty!" cried Dorothy, indignant tears springing to her eyes. To her
the fallen tree seemed like a stricken human being and the catastrophe
a terrible one. "It's taken that grand chestnut years and years and
years--longer'n you or I will ever live, like enough--to grow that
big, and to be thrown down all in a minute, and--you don't care a
mite, except to find your own silly opinion prove true!"

"Hold on, Dolly girl. This ain't no time for you an' me to begin
quarrelin'. I do care. I care more'n I can say but that don't hender
the course o' natur