ther night and
afterward when we followed Carlos!"

The tranquil beauty of her face was disturbed. When she answered her
voice had lost something of its music:

"What do you mean?"

"It was you who cried just now? It was you I saw running through
the woods?"

"What do you mean?" she asked again. "I have not run. I--I am not your
woman in black, if that's what you think. I happened to pick up this
cloak. You've seen it often enough before. And I haven't cried."

She brushed the tears angrily from her eyes.

"At least I haven't cried so any one could hear me. I wanted to walk. I
hoped I would find you. I thought you had come this way, so I came, too.
Why, Bobby, you're suspecting me of something!"

But the problem of the fugitive figure receded before the more intimate
one of his heart. There was a thrill in her desire to find him in the
solitude of the forest.

Only the faintest gray survived in the sky above the trees. The shadows
were thick about them. The whispering snow urged him to use this moment
for his happiness. It wasn't the thought of Graham that held him back.
Last night, under an equal temptation, he might have spoken. To-night a
new element silenced him and bound his eager hands. His awakening at the
head of the stairs raised an obstacle to self-revelation around which
there seemed to exist no path.

"I'm sorry. Let us go back," he said.

She looked at him inquiringly.

"What is it, Bobby? You are more afraid to-day than you have ever been
before. Has something happened I know nothing of?"

He shook his head. He couldn't increase her own trouble by telling
her of that.

The woods seemed to receive an ashy illumination from the passage of the
snowflakes. Katherine walked a little faster.

"Don't be discouraged, Bobby," she begged him. "Everything will come out
straight. You must keep telling yourself that. You must fight until you
believe it."

The nearness of her dusk-clothed, slender figure filled him with a new
courage, obscured to an extent his real situation. He burst out
impulsively:

"Don't worry. I'll fight. I'll make myself believe. If necessary I'll
tell everything I know in order to find the guilty person."

She placed her hand on his arm. Her voice fell to a whisper.

"Don't fight that way. Uncle Silas is dead; Howells has been taken away.
The police will find nothing. By and by they will leave. It will all be
forgotten. Why should you keep it active and dangerous by tryin