you to take
such a hard journey. Your sister died, and you brought her little boy,
Rodman, back, but you were so ill that a stranger had to take care of
you on the stage-coach and drive you to Edgewood next day in his own
sleigh. It is no wonder you have forgotten something of what happened,
for Dr. Perry hardly brought you through the brain fever that followed
that journey."

"I seem to think, now, that it is not so!" said Mrs. Boynton, opening
her eyes and looking at Waitstill despairingly. "I must grope and grope
in the dark until I find out what is true, and then tell Ivory. God will
punish false speaking! His heart is closed against lies and evil-doing!"

"He will never punish you if your tired mind remembers wrong," said
Waitstill. "He knows, none better, how you have tried to find Him and
hold Him, through many a tangled path. I will come as often as I can and
we will try to frighten away these worrying thoughts."

"If you will only come now and then and hold my hand," said Ivory's
mother,--"hold my hand so that your strength will flow into my weakness,
perhaps I shall puzzle it all out, and God will help me to remember
right before I die."

"Everything that I have power to give away shall be given to you,"
promised Waitstill. "Now that I know you, and you trust me, you shall
never be left so alone again,--not for long, at any rate. When I stay
away you will remember that I cannot help it, won't you?"

"Yes, I shall think of you till I see you again I shall watch the long
lane more than ever now. Ivory sometimes takes the path across the
fields but my dear husband will come by the old road, and now there will
be you to look for!"

XVI. LOCKED OUT

AT the Baxters the late supper was over and the girls had not sat at the
table with their father, having eaten earlier, by themselves. The hired
men had gone home to sleep. Patty had retired to the solitude of her
bedroom almost at dusk, quite worn out with the heat, and Waitstill sat
under the peach tree in the corner of her own little garden, tatting,
and thinking of her interview with Ivory's mother. She sat there until
nearly eight o'clock, trying vainly to put together the puzzling details
of Lois Boynton's conversation, wondering whether the perplexities that
vexed her mind were real or fancied, but warmed to the heart by the
affection that the older woman seemed instinctively to feel for her.
"She did not know me, yet she cared for me at once," thou