ie inside her. She felt all a lie now: there was
the good that Tom had brought her! But the gloom was friendly. With a
resolution new to herself, she went up to Godfrey and said:

"If you are going to the town, let me walk with you, Cousin Godfrey. It
is getting so dark."

She felt as if an evil necessity--a thing in which man must not
believe--were driving her. But the poor child was not half so deceitful
inside as the words seemed to her issuing from her lips. It was such a
relief to be assured Godfrey had not seen Tom, that she felt as if she
could forego the sight of Tom for evermore. Her better feelings rushed
back, her old confidence and reverence; and, in the altogether
nebulo-chaotic condition of her mind, she felt as if, in his turn,
Godfrey had just appeared for her deliverance.

"I am not going to the town, Letty," he answered. "I came to meet you,
and we will go home together. It is no use waiting for the rain to
stop, and about as little to put up an umbrella, I have brought your
waterproof, and we must just take it as it comes."

The wind was up again, and the next moment Letty, on Godfrey's arm, was
struggling with the same storm she had so lately encountered leaning on
Tom's, while Tom was only too glad to be left alone on the floor of the
dismal hut, whence he did not venture to rise for some time, lest any
the most improbable thing should happen, to bring Mr. Wardour back. He
was as mortally afraid of being discovered as any young thief in a
farmer's orchard.

He had a dreary walk back to the public house where he had stabled his
horse; but he trudged it cheerfully, brooding with delight on Letty's
beauty, and her lovely confidence in Tom Helmer--a personage whom he
had begun to feel nobody trusted as he deserved.

"Poor child!" he said to himself--he as well as Godfrey patronized
her--"what a doleful walk home she will have with that stuck-up old
bachelor fellow!"

Nor, indeed, was it a very comfortable walk home she had, although
Godfrey talked all the way, as well as a head-wind, full of rain, would
permit. A few weeks ago she would have thought the walk and the talk
and everything delightful. But after Tom's airy converse on the same
level with herself, Godfrey's sounded indeed wise--very wise--but dull,
so dull! It is true the suspicion, hardly awake enough to be troublous,
lay somewhere in her, that in Godfrey's talk there was a value of which
in Tom's there was nothing; but then it was n