tall, awkward lad from North Ashley come to try over his part in
a quartet, asked Toucle to help Elly set the supper things on the table
if she should be late, and set off at a rapid pace by the short-cut over
the ledges.

As she hurried over the rough trail, frankly hastening, now frankly
alarmed, she thought that probably for all the life-time of the people
in the valley the death of Frank Warner would set a sinister element of
lurking danger in those familiar wooded slopes. Nothing _could_ have
happened to Paul, but still she hurried faster and faster, and as she
came near the upper edge of the pasture she began to shout loudly,
"Paul! Paul!" and to send out the high yodel-cry that was the family
assembly call. That act of shouting brought her a step nearer to panic.

But almost at once she heard the little boy's answer, not far from her
saw his dog bounding through the bushes, and as she emerged from the
woods into the open pasture she saw Paul running towards her, pail in
hand, evidently astonished to know her there. But there was about him
something more than astonishment, something which Marise's mother-eye
catalogued as furtitve, that consciousness of something to hide which
always looks to grown-ups like guilt. She gave no sign of seeing this,
however, stopping short to catch her breath, smiling at him, and
wondering with great intensity what in the world it could be. He looked
a little frightened.

He came up to her, answering her smile uneasily, and she saw that he had
only a few berries in his pail. At this she was relieved, thinking that
possibly all that had happened was that he had lingered to play. But
when she glanced back at his face, she had the impression that there was
something more, very much more. He had received some indelible
impression and it was his instinct to hide it from his mother. Her heart
sank forebodingly.

"What is the best thing to do?" she asked herself. "To speak about it
first, or to wait till he does?"

She sat down on a stone, fanning herself with her hat, watching him,
trying to make out the meaning of every shift of expression, turn of
eye, position of his hands, carriage of his head, bringing to this all
her accumulated knowledge of Paul, afire with the sudden passion to
protect him which had flamed up with her intuition that something had
happened to him.

(Come and gone with the dry rapidity of fingers snapped, she had
thought, "The point is, that other people may