ully bolted, lest an intruder
should discover her. Locked in this place, she was comparatively safe,
at any rate, and doubted if she would be safe elsewhere.

The humid gloom of an ordinary wet day was doubled by the shade and
drip of the leafage. Autumn, this year, was coming in with rains.
Gazing, in her enforced idleness, from the one window of the
living-room, she could see various small members of the animal
community that lived unmolested there--creatures of hair, fluff, and
scale, the toothed kind and the billed kind; underground creatures,
jointed and ringed--circumambulating the hut, under the impression
that, Giles having gone away, nobody was there; and eying it
inquisitively with a view to winter-quarters. Watching these
neighbors, who knew neither law nor sin, distracted her a little from
her trouble; and she managed to while away some portion of the
afternoon by putting Giles's home in order and making little
improvements which she deemed that he would value when she was gone.

Once or twice she fancied that she heard a faint noise amid the trees,
resembling a cough; but as it never came any nearer she concluded that
it was a squirrel or a bird.

At last the daylight lessened, and she made up a larger fire for the
evenings were chilly. As soon as it was too dark--which was
comparatively early--to discern the human countenance in this place of
shadows, there came to the window to her great delight, a tapping which
she knew from its method to be Giles's.

She opened the casement instantly, and put out her hand to him, though
she could only just perceive his outline. He clasped her fingers, and
she noticed the heat of his palm and its shakiness.

"He has been walking fast, in order to get here quickly," she thought.
How could she know that he had just crawled out from the straw of the
shelter hard by; and that the heat of his hand was feverishness?

"My dear, good Giles!" she burst out, impulsively.

"Anybody would have done it for you," replied Winterborne, with as much
matter-of-fact as he could summon.

"About my getting to Exbury?" she said.

"I have been thinking," responded Giles, with tender deference, "that
you had better stay where you are for the present, if you wish not to
be caught. I need not tell you that the place is yours as long as you
like; and perhaps in a day or two, finding you absent, he will go away.
At any rate, in two or three days I could do anything to assist--such