don't
worry yourselves about me."

He turned away, but had scarcely proceeded half a dozen yards before
he felt a tug at his coat. Looking down he saw the diminutive Johnny.
"They'll be comin' home thith way," he said, reaching up in a hoarse
confidential whisper.

"Who?"

"Crethy and 'im."

But before the master could make any response to this presumably
gratifying information, Johnny had rejoined his brother. The two boys
waved their hands towards him with the same diffident and mysterious
sympathy that left him hesitating between a smile and a frown. Then he
proceeded on his way. Nevertheless, for no other reason than that he
felt a sudden distaste to meeting any one, when he reached the point
where the trail descended directly to the settlement, he turned into a
longer and more solitary detour by the woods.

The sun was already so low that its long rays pierced the forest from
beneath, and suffused the dim colonnade of straight pine shafts with a
golden haze, while it left the dense intercrossed branches fifty feet
above in deeper shadow. Walking in this yellow twilight, with his feet
noiselessly treading down the yielding carpet of pine needles, it seemed
to the master that he was passing through the woods in a dream. There
was no sound but the dull intermittent double knock of the wood-pecker,
or the drowsy croak of some early roosting bird; all suggestion of the
settlement, with all traces of human contiguity, were left far behind.
It was therefore with a strange and nervous sense of being softly hailed
by some woodland sprite that he seemed to hear his own name faintly
wafted upon the air. He turned quickly; it was Cressy, panting behind
him! Even then, in her white closely gathered skirts, her bared head
and graceful arching neck bent forward, her flying braids freed from
the straw hat which she had swung from her arm so as not to impede her
flight, there was so much of the following Maenad about her that he was
for an instant startled.

He stopped; she bounded to him, and throwing her arms around his neck
with a light laugh, let herself hang for a moment breathless on his
breast. Then recovering her speech she said slowly:--

"I started on an Injin trot after you, just as you turned off the trail,
but you'd got so far ahead while I was shaking myself clear of Uncle Ben
that I had to jist lope the whole way through the woods to catch up."
She stopped, and looking up into his troubled face caught his c