the shadow of a very real man followed her down the
road--a shadow in grotesquely flapping rags, with head flung back. A
dozen times she caught herself listening for the tramp of his feet
beside hers, and flushed hotly at the nagging consciousness that
pointed out each time only the mocking echo of her own tread. Like
the left-behind cottage, the road became unexpectedly lonely and
discouraging.

"The devil take them both!" she sputtered at last. "When one man
refuses to be real at all, and the other pesters ye with being too
real--'tis time to quit their company and let them fetch up where and
how they like."

But an O'Connell is never a quitter; and deep down in Patsy's heart
was the determination to see the end of the road for all three of
them--if fate only granted the chance.

She came to a cross-roads at length. She had spied it from afar and
hailed it as the end of her troubles; now she would learn the right
way to Arden. But Patsy reckoned without chance--or some one else.
The sign-boards had all been ripped from their respective places on a
central post and lay propped up against its base. There was little
information in them for Patsy as she read: "Petersham, five miles;
Lebanon, twelve miles; Arden, seven miles--"

The last sign went spinning across the road, and Patsy dropped on a
near-by stone with the anguish of a great tragedian. "Seven
miles--seven miles! I'm as near to it and I know as much about it as
when I started three days ago. Sure, I feel like a mule, just, on a
treadmill, with Billy Burgeman in the hopper."

A feeling of utter helplessness took possession of her; it was as if
her experiences, her actions, her very words and emotions, were
controlled by an unseen power. Impulse might have precipitated her
into the adventure, but since her feet had trod the first stretch of
the road to Arden chance had sat somewhere, chuckling at his own
comedy--making, while he pulled her hither and yon, like a marionette
on a wire. Verily chance was still chuckling at the incongruity of
his stage setting: A girl pursuing a strange man, and a strange
sheriff pursuing the girl, and neither having an inkling of the
pursuit or the reason for it.

On one thing her mind clinched fast, however: she would at least sit
where she was until some one came by who could put her right, once
and for all; rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief--she would stop
whoever came first.

The arpeggio of an automobile horn brou