f him, so certain he had
grown that she would be waiting for him, a hint of laughter in her
eyes and the same disturbing question on her lips, and not until the
fat animal between the shafts had stopped of her own accord before the
straggling fence did he realize that the girl was not there. Then her
absence smote him full.

It frightened him. Right from the first he was conscious of impending
disaster born quite entirely of the knowledge of his own guilt. The
front door of the house was open and after fruitless minutes of
panicky pondering he clambered down and advanced uncertainly toward
it. His shadow across the threshold heralded his reluctant coming, and
Dryad turned from the half-filled box upon the table over which she
had been bending and nodded to him almost before he caught sight of
her.

That little, intimately brief inclination of the head was her only
greeting. With hands grasping each side of the door-frame Old Jerry
stood there and gazed about the room. It had never been anything but
bare and empty looking--now with the few larger pieces of furniture
which it had contained all stacked in one corner and the smaller
articles already stored away in a half-dozen boxes, the last of which
was holding the girl's absorbed attention, it would have been barnlike
had it not been so small. From where he stood Old Jerry could see
through into the smaller back-room workshop. Even its shelves were
empty,--entirely stripped of their rows of tiny white woman-figures.

He paled as he grasped the ominous import of it; he tried to speak
unconcernedly, but his voice was none too steady.

"So you're a-house-cleanin', be you?" he asked jauntily. "Ain't you
commencin' a little early?"

He was uncomfortably conscious of that interrogative gleam in Dryad's
glance--that amused glimmer which he couldn't quite fathom--when she
turned her head. She was smiling, too, a little--smiling with her lips
as well as with her eyes.

"No-o-o," she stated with preoccupied lack of emphasis, as she bent
again over the box. "No--I'm packing up."

Old Jerry had known that that would be her answer. He had been certain
of it. The other interpretation--the only other possible one which
could be put upon the dismantled room--had been nothing more or less
than a momentary and desperate grasping at a straw.

For a while he was very, very quiet, wondering just what it was in her
mind which made her so cheerfully indifferent to his presence. She