morrow morning."

"How can ye come of a morning? Your time's not your own."

"I say I'll come." She enunciated the words emphatically as Hutchins's
crutches were heard coming near the door. Then she left the room.

CHAPTER XIII.

The wood behind the college grounds and Captain Rexford's pasture had
appeared to Bates to be a place possessed only by the winds of heaven
and by such sunshine and shadow as might fall to its share. He had
formed this estimate of it while he had lain for many days watching the
waving of its boughs from out his window, and therefore he had named it
to Eliza as a place where he could talk to her. Eliza well knew that
this wood was no secluded spot in the season of summer visitors, but she
was in too reckless a mood to care for this, any more than she cared for
the fact that she had no right to leave the hotel in the morning. She
left that busy house, not caring whether it suffered in her absence or
not, and went to the appointed place, heedless of the knowledge that she
was as likely as not to meet with some of her acquaintances there. Yet,
as she walked, no one seeing her would have thought that this young
woman had a heart rendered miserable by her own acts and their
legitimate outcome. In her large comeliness she suggested less of
feeling than of force, just as the gown she wore had more pretension to
fashion than to grace.

When she entered the wood it was yet early morning. Bates was not there.
She had come thus early because she feared hindrance to her coming, not
because she cared when he came. She went into the young spruce fringes
of the wood near the Rexford pasture, and sat down where she had before
sat to watch Principal Trenholme's house. The leaves of the elm above
her were turning yellow; the sun-laden wind that came between the spruce
shades seemed chill to her; she felt cold, an unusual thing for her, and
the time seemed terribly long. When she saw Bates coming she went to the
more frequented aisles of the trees to meet him.

Bates had never been a tall man, but now, thin and weak, he seemed a
small one, although he still strove to hold himself up manfully. His
face this day was grey with the weariness of a sleepless night, and his
enemy, asthma, was hard upon him--a man's asthma, that is a fierce thing
because it is not yielded to gracefully, but is struggled against.

"Oh, but you're ill, Mr. Bates," she said, relapsing into that repeated
expression of yesterday