ad troubled him for
a while had been with laughter pushed away. On his mind during the first
of his two or three visits had been the thought that Miss Dunham could
not know of his presence in the midnight raid.

They were in the woods together one evening, a little beyond the papaw
thicket, when Ambrose, thrusting his hand into his pocket, drew forth a
carefully wrapped up package. "It ain't a present; it's yours already,"
he announced, pushing it toward Emily with his face crimsoning, and
digging his toes into the earth like a big, awkward boy.

Slowly the girl unfolded her lost hairbrush, and, though her eyes
immediately shone with laughter, womanlike she kept her lids down,
asking with a kind of over-emphasized wonder, "How on earth, Mr.
Ambrose Thompson, could you ever have come upon my hairbrush?"

And in another moment Ambrose had confessed everything of his own part
in the raid, told his story miserably and without extenuating
circumstances, and ending with the statement that he couldn't endure to
have her friendship until she knew the full extent of his unmanliness.

Then Emily allowed herself to look straight at him and her laughter
brimmed over. "Why, I've known all along," she whispered, putting her
hand for just the briefest, comforting second over the top of his.
"Don't you suppose that I recognized the voice coming from the longest
shadow I ever saw as soon as I saw the longest man in Pennyroyal?"

Two weeks afterward it happened as usual that Miner and Ambrose were
both in their shop closing up for the night, but, what was most
remarkable, Miner was allowing Ambrose to do the greater part of the
work, and for fifteen minutes had been sitting on the top of a vinegar
barrel idly whittling at a stick and every once in a while clearing his
throat as though he were getting ready to speak, notwithstanding he
kept his face turned from the sight of his partner.

"Looks like Miss Dunham's gettin' more cheerfuller lately," he blurted
at last, not glancing up, but whittling so briskly that the chips about
him on the floor looked like the shorn curls of a lamb.

Ambrose lifted his face from the depth of a large ledger where he had
been laboriously writing down the day's accounts. "Yes, ain't she?" he
returned happily; "seems like she's sorter too big to be hurt by other
folk's meannesses." Then walking across the shop he laid his hand on his
friend's shoulder with a gesture that was almost a caress.

"You bee