him about it and asked him what he thought we had better do.
At first he was incredulous, then thoroughly alarmed. It was not so much
the thought of having to settle for the loss of the horses that
terrified him as it was the dread that he might be imprisoned for
exposing poison to domestic animals.

"Don't say a word!" he exclaimed. "Nobody knows about that fox bed. If
we keep still, it will never come out."

Addison and I both felt that such secrecy would leave us with a mighty
mean feeling in our hearts; but Willis begged us never to say a word
about it to any one. He was as penitent as we were, I think; but the
thought that he might have to go to jail filled him with panic.

We went home in a very uncomfortable frame of mind, without having
reached any decision.

"We've got to square this somehow," Addison said. "If I had the money,
I'd settle for the colts and say nothing more to Willis about it."

"Money wouldn't make Mrs. Kennard feel much better," I said.

"That's so; but we might find a pretty sorrel colt somewhere, and make
her a present of it in place, of Sylph--if we only had the money."

If it had not been for Willis, I rather think that we should have gone
to the old Squire that very evening and told him the whole story; but
the legal consequences of the affair troubled us, and since they
affected Willis more than they affected us we did not like to say
anything.

Week after week went by without our being able to bring ourselves to
confess. The concealment was a source of daily uneasiness to us;
although we rarely spoke of the affair to each other, it was always on
our minds. Whenever we did speak of it together, Addison would say,
"We've got to straighten that out," or, "I hate to have that colt scrape
hanging on us in this way." We tried several times to get Willis's
consent to our telling the old Squire; but he had brooded over the thing
so long that he had convinced himself that if his act became known he
would surely be sent to the penitentiary.

So there the matter lay covered up all summer until one afternoon in
September, when the old Squire drove to the village to contract for his
apple barrels, and I went with him to get a pair of boots. Just as we
were starting for home we met Mrs. Kennard. Previously she had often
visited us at the farm, but since the death of Sylph she had not come
near us. The old Squire tried to-day to be more cordial than ever, but
Mrs. Kennard answered him rather