s."

Ambrose knew himself for a liar before the girl on the ground began
rocking herself back and forth with her hands clasped over her knees.

"I ought to, I ought to, I ought to," she repeated until her words had
the swaying influence of a chant. "You know nothin' about it. I have
been in that place so long I can't remember anywheres else. How can I
have friends? I don't know nobody, I don't love nobody, I ain't nobody!
Why, there's mornings when I get up and lookin' at the other orphans,
seein' we are dressed alike and got to do the same things at the same
time all day, I begin to think maybe there ain't any _me_. I'm just one
of them--any one." She began crying now, but that did not interrupt her
passionate speech. "I've been thinkin' of runnin' away a long time.
P'raps I'll have a hard time; I don't care. Ain't I a right to find
out?"

And this of course the young man could not answer, so he only passed his
hand over his brow. "Well, you might 'a' stayed at the asylum a little
longer," and then because he was Ambrose, "or at least till I got safely
past that woodpile."

"I was too old," she defended. "I ought not to have stayed so long as I
did, only nobody knew what to do with me." She was looking up into her
companion's face close, that she might find something more of help in
it. "Maybe you know some one that might want me? I know lots of things,
cleanin' and cookin' some----" She would like to have continued to pour
out her poor list of accomplishments, but Ambrose stopped her.

For some time the fear had been growing upon him that the child he
believed himself to have rescued was not so much a child as he had first
supposed. Of course he had never seen her very plainly and there was
nothing to judge by in her short, scant dress. "Would you mind," he now
inquired, "tellin' me just about how old you are?"

"Sixteen."

Ambrose groaned. For in Kentucky half a century ago, you must remember,
sixteen was thought an age nearer that of a woman than of a girl.

"Then I've got to take you back to the orphans," he announced.

However, his declaration had not even the distinction of being listened
to, for the girl, with her chin sunk in her clasped hands, was plainly
thinking of something else. Now she put one hand timidly on his coat
sleeve, and Ambrose could see that she had a curiously pointed chin and
that her eyes were like deep wells with the moonlight shining down into
them. "Maybe you'll tell me where _y