he situation was
profoundly altered by the mere fact that the young man was riding. She
tried to drop behind; but the team had an infinite capacity for
loitering. At last, with head high in the air, she darted ahead of the
team, and walked as fast as she could. Although she heard no orders
given by their driver, she knew at once that the oxen had quickened
their pace, and that she was not leaving them behind.

Presently she found herself overtaken; whereupon, with swelling heart
and face averted, she dropped again to the rear. She was drawing
perilously near the verge of that feminine cataclysm, tears, when Fate
stepped in to save her from such a mortification.

Fate goes about in many merry disguises. At this juncture she presented
herself under the aspect of two half-tipsy commercial travellers driving
a single horse in a light open trap. They were driving in from the
Settlement, in haste to reach the hotel at Bolton Corners before
nightfall. The youth hawed his team vigorously till the nigh wheels were
on the other side of the ditch, leaving a liberal share of the road for
them to pass in.

But the drummers were not satisfied with this. After a glance at the
bashful face and dejected attitude of the young man on the ox-cart, they
decided that they wanted the whole road. When their horse's head almost
touched the horns of the off ox, they stopped.

"Get out of the way there!" cried the man who held the reins,
insolently.

At any other time Jim-Ed would have resented the town man's tone and
words; just now he was thinking about the way Liz had changed.

"I've gi'n ye the best half o' the road, mister," he said,
deprecatingly, "'n' I can't do no better fer ye than that."

"Yes, you can, too," shouted the driver of the trap; "you can give us
the whole road. It won't hurt your old cart to go out in the stumps, but
_we_ ain't going to drive in the ditch, not by a jugful. Get over, I
tell you, and be quick about it."

To this the youth made no immediate reply; but he began to forget about
the girl, and to feel himself growing hot. As for the girl, she had
stepped to the front, resolved to "show off" and to make very manifest
to the city men her scorn for her companion. Her cheeks and eyes were
flaming, and the drummers were not slow to respond to the challenge
which she flashed at them from under her drooped lids.

"Ah, there, my beauty!" said the driver, his attention for a moment
diverted from the question of r