I don't."

Jan-an was impressed.

"I ain't making them notice me," she mumbled, "but yer just can't take
a joke."

Noreen and Jan-an, in those warm autumn days--and what an autumn it
was!--often came to the little chapel where Northrup wrote.

They knew this was forbidden; they knew that the mornings were to be
undisturbed, but what could a man who loved children say to the two
patient creatures crouching at the foot of the stone steps leading up
to the church?

Northrup could hear them whisper--it blended with the twittering
of the birds--he heard Noreen's chuckle and Jan-an's warning.
Occasionally a flaming maple branch would fall through the window
on to his table; once Ginger was propelled through the door with a
note, badly printed by Noreen, tied to his collar.

"We're here," the strangely scrawled words informed him; "me and
Jan-an. We've got something for you."

But Northrup held rigidly to his working hours and finally made an
offer to his most persistent foes.

"See here, you little beggars," he said, including the gaunt Jan-an in
this, "if you keep to the other side of the bridge, I'll tell you a
story, once a day."

This had been the beginning of romance to Jan-an.

The story-telling, thus agreed upon, opened a new opportunity for
meeting Mary-Clare. Quite naturally she shared with Noreen and Jan-an
the hours of the late afternoon walks in the woods or, occasionally,
by the fireside of her own home when the chilly gloaming fell early.

Often Northrup, casting a hurried thought to his past, and then
forward to the time when all this pleasure must end, looked
thoughtful. How circumscribed those old days had been; how uneventful
at the best! How strange the old ways would seem by and by, touched by
the glamour of what he was passing through now!

And, as was often the case, Manly's words came out like guiding and
warning flashes. The future could only be made safe by the present;
the past--well! Northrup would not dwell upon that. He would keep the
compact with himself.

He went boldly to the yellow house when the mood seized him. His first
encounters with Mary-Clare, after that night at the inn when he had
watched her sleeping, had reassured him.

"She was not awake!" he concluded. The belief made it possible for him
to act with assurance.

Peter and Polly preserved a discreet silence concerning affairs in the
Forest. "You never can tell when a favouring wind will right things
again," Poll