again among the ugly realities of
life. Did she, too, hate to return to them? Or why else did she walk so
slowly--why did she seem as much afraid as himself to break the silence
that held them in its magic circle?

A dead pine-branch caught in the edge of her skirt, and she stood still
while Amherst bent down to release her. As she turned to help him he
looked up with a smile.

"The wood doesn't want to let you go," he said.

She made no reply, and he added, rising: "But you'll come back to
it--you'll come back often, I hope."

He could not see her face in the dimness, but her voice trembled a
little as she answered: "I will do what you tell me--but I shall be
alone--against all the others: they don't understand."

The simplicity, the helplessness, of the avowal, appealed to him not as
a weakness but as a grace. He understood what she was really saying:
"How can you desert me? How can you put this great responsibility on me,
and then leave me to bear it alone?" and in the light of her unuttered
appeal his action seemed almost like cruelty. Why had he opened her eyes
to wrongs she had no strength to redress without his aid?

He could only answer, as he walked beside her toward the edge of the
wood: "You will not be alone--in time you will make the others
understand; in time they will be with you."

"Ah, you don't believe that!" she exclaimed, pausing suddenly, and
speaking with an intensity of reproach that amazed him.

"I hope it, at any rate," he rejoined, pausing also. "And I'm sure that
if you will come here oftener--if you'll really live among your
people----"

"How can you say that, when you're deserting them?" she broke in, with a
feminine excess of inconsequence that fairly dashed the words from his
lips.

"Deserting them? Don't you understand----?"

"I understand that you've made Mr. Gaines and Truscomb angry--yes; but
if I should insist on your staying----"

Amherst felt the blood rush to his forehead. "No--no, it's not
possible!" he exclaimed, with a vehemence addressed more to himself than
to her.

"Then what will happen at the mills?"

"Oh, some one else will be found--the new ideas are stirring everywhere.
And if you'll only come back here, and help my successor----"

"Do you think they are likely to choose any one else with your ideas?"
she interposed with unexpected acuteness; and after a short silence he
answered: "Not immediately, perhaps; but in time--in time there will be
improveme