er from itself with its own love. Now and then he looked down at
her, and the sight of the little, pale, flower-like face turned
towards his with a serious, guileless scrutiny, like a baby's, caused
him to fairly tremble with his passion of protection and adoration.
They talked very little. Charlotte, if the truth were told, in spite
of the tender nursing she had received, was still feeling rather
shaken, and she had also a curious sense of timid and excited
happiness, which tied her tongue and wove her thoughts even into an
incoherent dazzle. When Anderson spoke, it was very coolly, on quite
indifferent topics, and Charlotte answered him in her soft, rather
unsteady little voice, and then conversation lagged again. It was on
Anderson's tongue to question her closely as to her entire recovery
from her fright of the afternoon, but he did not even do that, being
afraid to trust his voice.

As they drew near the Carroll house, a doubt and perplexity which had
been haunting Charlotte, assumed larger proportions, and Anderson
himself had a thought also of the complication. Charlotte was
wondering if she should ask him in. She was wondering what her mother
and aunt would think. She knew what they would do, of course--that
is, so far as their reception of the man who had befriended her, and
whose mother had befriended her was concerned. They were gentlewomen.
And she knew quite certainly about her father. But she wondered as to
their real attitude, their mental attitude, and she wondered still
more with regard to Anderson. Would he expect to be invited in? In
what fashion did he read his own social status in the village.
Anderson also was considering, during the last of the way, if he
should enter the Carroll house and present his apologies and his
mother's for having urged the fugitive members of the family to
remain, and he wondered a good deal as to the desirable course for
him to adopt, even supposing he were invited. While he had no
consciousness whatever of any loss of prestige among people whom he
had always known in the village, while, in fact, he never gave it a
thought--yet he knew reasonably that outsiders might possibly look at
matters differently, that his own unshaken estimate of himself, the
estimate which was the same in a grocery-store as in a lawyer's
office, might not be accepted. He recognized the fact with amusement
rather than indignation, but he recognized it. He wondered how the
girl would look at it a