self, he knew of no one to ask
to shelter the girl, and take her back to the asylum he would not.
Should he turn her over to a stranger she would promptly be sent back
there in the morning. Yet here were the lights of a village showing
close ahead of them, and every now and then old Liza stumbled, almost
falling from weariness.

Ambrose's prayer half awakened the girl. Anyhow, she sat up for a moment
rubbing her eyes, to hear him asking: "Whatever is your name?"

"Sarah," and then her head swayed again.

But Ambrose sat straight up giving his reins an unexpected joyous flap.
"Glory, why ain't I thought of it before?" he asked of no one. Then
aloud: "When Abraham drew near to the land of the Egyptians didn't he
admonish Sarah, his wife, to say she was his sister that it might be
well with him and that his soul should live?" He grinned silently. "I'm
findin' the patriarchs pretty useful this trip, but I reckon if Abraham
could say that his wife Sarah was his sister to save his _own_ skin, I
can tell the same kind of a one to save a girl."

"Wake up, Sarah," he urged, when a few moments later he drew rein before
a red brick tavern door, "and if anybody asks questions, recollect you
are to say you're my sister."

However, on that same evening, when Sarah put up her lips for a sister's
good night kiss, it was the boy who turned away. There was something in
this girl that called to him too strongly, something fragrant and as yet
unawakened, and then he had not dreamed she was so pretty, with her
scarlet cheeks and big, heavy-lidded eyes, some poor little child of Eve
from a far different land than his blond Kentucky. It looked, too, as
though the little force the girl had, had now spent itself in her one
effort of running a way, and hereafter some one would surely have to
look after her. "Not only had she never been taught at the asylum to
think for herself," the boy reflected, "she ain't never even been
allowed to."

Nevertheless the girl slept untroubled in her high-post bed in the best
guest chamber of the tavern, while Ambrose in a tiny room close under
the roof, lay awake for a long time. He was not in the woods alone as he
had dreamed of being, and yet he was not unhappy. He was not listening
to the voices of nature as he knew her, but to the stirrings of his own
blood, to the beating of his own heart.

More than once in order to stay his restlessness Ambrose had risen from
his bed and stood leaning and looking