aneous gracefulness, and fitted
the velvet cap on her straying hair. Then she said hurriedly, "Run
quick, papa dear, and as you go, call him in and say I am quite ready."

Thus adjured, the obedient parent disappeared in the darkness. With him
also disappeared Miss Amy's singular alacrity. Sitting down carefully
again on the edge of the bunk, she leaned against the post with a
certain indefinable languor that was as touching as it was graceful. I
need not tell any feminine readers that there was no dissimulation in
all this,--no coquetry, no ostentation,--and that the young girl was
perfectly sincere! But the masculine reader might like to know that the
simple fact was that, since she had regained consciousness, she had
been filled with remorse for her capricious and ungenerous rejection of
Tenbrook's proffered service. More than that, she felt she had periled
her life in that moment of folly, and that this man--this hero--had
saved her. For hero he was, even if he did not fulfill her ideal,--it
was only SHE that was not a heroine. Perhaps if he had been more like
what she wished she would have felt this less keenly; love leaves little
room for the exercise of moral ethics. So Miss Amy Forester, being a
good girl at bottom, and not exactly loving this man, felt towards him a
frank and tender consideration which a more romantic passion would have
shrunk from showing. Consequently, when Tenbrook entered a moment
later, he found Amy paler and more thoughtful, but, as he fancied,
much prettier than before, looking up at him with eyes of the sincerest
solicitude.

Nevertheless, he remained standing near the door, as if indicating a
possible intrusion, his face wearing a look of lowering abstraction. It
struck her that this might be the effect of his long hair and general
uncouthness, and this only spurred her to a fuller recognition of his
other qualities.

"I am afraid," she began, with a charming embarrassment, "that instead
of resting satisfied with your kindness in carrying me up here, I will
have to burden you again with my dreadful weakness, and ask you to carry
me down also. But all this seems so little after what you have just done
and for which I can never, NEVER hope to thank you!" She clasped her two
little hands together, holding her gloves between, and brought them down
upon her lap in a gesture as prettily helpless as it was unaffected.

"I have done scarcely anything," he said, glancing away towards the
fi