g to do
with it. She was conscious that she had colored like any silly girl,
at she hardly knew what. She was provoked with herself, for letting
the shadow of such things touch her. She hurried on, up the rough
bank, before Mr. Kirkbright. When she reached the top, she turned
round and faced him; this time with a determinedly cool cheek.

"I don't know why I said that. I did not suppose you thought you
could learn anything of me," she said. "I was confused to think I
had asked you in that offhand way to my house. I have not been very
long used to being the head of a house."

She smiled one of those bits of smiles of hers; a mere relaxation of
the lips that showed the white tips of her front teeth and just
indicated the peculiar, pretty curve with which the others were set
behind them; feeling reassured and reinstated in her own
self-respect by her explanation. Then, without letting him answer,
she turned swiftly round again, and sprang up the rugged stairway of
the shelving rock.

But she had not uninvited him, after all.

They found Miss Kirkbright and Sylvie waiting for them at the red
house. It was a quaint structure, with a kind of old, foreign look
about it. It made you think either of an ancient family mansion in
some provincial French town, or of a convent for nuns.

It was of dark red brick,--the quality of which Mr. Kirkbright
remarked with satisfaction,--with high walls at the gable ends
carried above the slope of the roof. These were met and overclasped
at the corners by wide, massive eaves. A high, narrow door with a
fan-light occupied the middle of the end before which the party
stood. Windows above, with little balconies, were hung with old red
woolen damask, fading out in stripes; perishing, doubtless, with
moth and decay; in one was suspended a rusty bird-cage which had
once been gilt.

What an honest neighborhood this was, in which these things had
remained for years, and not even the panes of the windows had been
broken by little boys! But then the villages full of little boys
were miles away, and the single families at the nearer farms were
well ordered Puritan folk, fathered and mothered in careful, old
fashioned sort. There was some indefinite awe, also, of the lonely
place, and of the rich, far-off owner who might come any day to look
after his rights, and make a reckoning with them.

Up, from platform to platform of the terraced rock, as Sylvie had
said, climbed the successive sections o