ded dangerously like a sob. "If ye only knew what ye
have saved me from--and what I am owing ye--" Her hands fell, and she
looked at him with a sudden shy concern. "Poor lad! Here ye are--a
fit subject for a hospital, and I'm wasting time talking instead of
trying to mend ye up. Do ye think there might be water hereabouts
where we could wash off some of that--grease paint?"

But the tinker was contemplating his right foot; he was standing on
the other. "Don't bother about those scratches; they go rather well
with the clothes, don't you think? It's this ankle that's bothering
me; I must have turned it when I jumped."

"Can't ye walk on it? Ye can lean on this"--she passed him the
pilgrim staff--"and we can go slowly. Bad luck to the man! If I had
known ye were hurt I'd have made ye leave him in the road and we'd
have driven his machine back to Arden for him." She looked longingly
after the trail of dust.

"Your ethics are questionable, but your geography is worse. Arden
isn't back there."

"What do ye mean? Why, I saw Arden, back yonder, with my own
eyes--not an hour ago."

"No, you didn't. You saw Dansville; Arden is over there," and the
tinker's hand pointed over his shoulder at right angles to the road.

"Holy Saint Branden!" gasped Patsy. "Maybe ye'll have the boldness,
then, to tell me I'm still seven miles from it?"

"You are." But this time he did not laugh--a smile was the utmost he
could manage with the pain in his ankle.

Patsy looked as if she might have laughed or cried with equal ease.
"Seven miles--seven miles! Tramp the road for four days and be just
as near the end as I was at the start--" An expression of
enlightenment shot into her face. "Faith, I must have been going in a
circle, then."

The tinker nodded an affirmative.

"And who in the name of reason was the man in the car?"

"That's what I'd like to know; the unmitigated nerve of him!" he
finished to himself. His chin set itself squarely; his face had grown
as white as Patsy's had been and his eyes became doggedly determined.
"If it isn't a piece of impertinence, I'd like to ask how you
happened to be with him, that way?"

Patsy flushed. "I'm thinking ye've earned the right to an answer. I
took him for the lad I was looking for. I thought the place was
Arden, and--and the clothes were the same."

"The clothes!" the tinker repeated it in the same bewildered way that
had been his when Patsy first found him; then he turned and grasped