Miss Farnsworth
looked on silently. If she appreciated this care for her safety, she
did not make it apparent. Only, as Jarvis finished a very careful
examination and testing of the side-saddle and stood erect with a
smile at her, she said: "Thank you"--quite as if she had no mind to
say it. With which he was obliged to be content.

He silently put her upon the mare, held the animal quiet while he
looked for the space of one slow breath gravely up into the girl's
face, meeting only lowered lashes and a scornful mouth, and let go the
bits. An instant later brown Betty and her rider were twenty rods down
the road.

The two men watched her round the turn. Then Jarvis sprang to his
place.

"Load the rest of the stuff in--quick," he said, and the other obeyed.

"Gee!" remarked the station agent to himself, watching the cloud of
dust in which the wagon was disappearing. "Looks like he'd got left.
He can't catch the mare--not with that load. Say, but her and Betty
made a picture--that's right."

* * * * *

The road from Crofton Junction to the Hempstead Farms lay, for the
most part, down hill. The black pair appreciated this fact. They had
been trained in double harness from the beginning, and their ideas of
life and its purposes were identical. They now joined forces to take
the freight home in the shortest and most impracticable space of time.

Jarvis kept them well in hand. If he had had them in front of a light
vehicle of some sort, unencumbered with a miscellaneous and unstowable
lot of freight, he would have enjoyed letting them have their will. As
it was, he was obliged to consider several conflicting elements in the
situation and restrain the colts accordingly. His pace, therefore, was
not sufficiently fast to allow him to gain upon the fleet-footed mare
and her rider, and the winding road gave him no hint of their
whereabouts. He did not belong to the household of boarders at the
Hempstead Farms; his presence there just now was a matter of business
with one of the elderly gentlemen who were taking their vacation upon
the farmhouse porch--that and a certain willingness to attend
carefully and unhurriedly to business which had brought him within
sight of a certain girl.

It was a bit dull driving back alone. He was not familiar with the
road; it was not the one by which he had come. Miss Farnsworth had not
planned this outcome of the trip from the beginning--he gave her
credit