g at the
school-house after lessons. Go right home! Don't look after these men
TO-DAY--to-morrow, Saturday, is your holiday--you know--and you'll have
more time. Keep to yourself to-day as much as you can, dear, for twelve
hours--until--until--you hear from me, you know. It will be all right
then," she added, lifting her eyelids with a sudden odd resemblance to
her father's look of drowsy pain, which Ford had never noticed before.
"Promise me that, dear, won't you?"

With a mental reservation he promised hurriedly--preoccupied in his
wonder why she seemed to avoid his explanation, in his desire to know
what had happened, in the pride that had kept him from asking more or
volunteering a defence, and in his still haunting sense of having been
wronged. Yet he could not help saying as he caught and held her hand:--

"YOU have not doubted me, Cressy? YOU have not allowed this infamous
raking up of things that are past and gone to alter your feelings?"

She looked at him abstractedly. "You think it might alter ANYBODY'S
feelings, then?"

"Nobody's who really loved another"--he stammered.

"Don't let us talk of it any more," she said suddenly stretching out
her arms, lifting them above her head with a wearied gesture, and then
letting them fall clasped before her in her old habitual fashion. "It
makes my head ache; what with Paw and Maw and the rest of them--I'm sick
of it all."

She turned away as Ford drew back coldly and let her hand fall from
his arm. She took a few steps forward, stopped, ran back to him again,
crushed his face and head in a close embrace, and then seemed to dip
like a bird into the tall bracken, and was gone.

The master stood for some moments chagrined and bewildered; it was
characteristic of his temperament that he had paid less heed to what
she told him than what he IMAGINED had passed between her mother and
herself. She was naturally jealous of the letters--he could forgive her
for that; she had doubtless been twitted about them, but he could easily
explain them to her parents--as he would have done to her. But he was
not such a fool as to elope with her at such a moment, without first
clearing his character--and knowing more of hers. And it was equally
characteristic of him that in his sense of injury he confounded her with
the writer of the letters--as sympathizing with his correspondent in her
estimate of his character, and was quite carried away with the belief
that he was equally wronged