beguiling dull time, and rendering
oneself late for school.

For various reasons the church-going population took to the public
highway on Sabbaths. Those who drove went this way from necessity, and
those who didn't went because they were always picked up before they
had gone half a mile. Besides, parents had long since learned that
Sabbath clothes as well as Sabbath decorum were apt to suffer from the
conveniences of the Short Cut.

William Gordon alone took this solitary road on Sabbath afternoons, for
he loved the loneliness and quiet of the woods. This arrangement
suited everyone except Elizabeth. Her heart always suffered a pang as
they all turned up the lane together, and her father went away alone in
the opposite direction. Once she had begged so hard to accompany him
that he had yielded, and she had walked by his side, holding his hand,
in silent sympathy, all the way over the sunny fields and through the
cool green shadows of the woods. She had been quiet and good and he
had said she was his little comforter, but Elizabeth had never gone
again. It was not that she had found the walk dull in comparison to
the companionship of the regular highway, for Elizabeth would have
walked through a fiery furnace with her father in preference to any
other road. But that wise older self had told her that her father
preferred to be alone. She could not have told how she knew, but she
was seldom mistaken in her intuition and followed it. And so, though
it wrung her heart to see him go alone, she merely watched him with
loving eyes, until his bowed head and thin, stooped shoulders
disappeared from view in the willowy ravine.

Those who walked started only a few minutes before the phaeton, for if
they were not picked up by Martin's big double buggy on the Champlain
Road, then the MacAllisters would take them in at the corner, or they
would be gathered to the bosoms of the Wully Johnstones before they had
gone many rods down the line.

The Martins were a trifle late to-day and, to Elizabeth's joy, they
reached the corner where four great elms stretched out their sweeping
arms to each other just as MacAllister's ample three-seated buggy came
lumbering along. Charles Stuart was there on the front seat beside his
father, to be sure; but Mother MacAllister was in the back seat alone.
The girls climbed in, Sarah Emily and all, and Archie and John took
their places in Wully Johnstone's vehicle that had just emerged from