“Was such a bidding required, Maud!  How long has an order been necessary to bring you to console me?”

“That is a calculation I have never entered into, Bob,” answered Maud, slightly blushing, and openly smiling, and that in a way, too, to take all the sting out of her words—­“as young ladies can have more suitable occupations, one might think.  You will admit I guided you faithfully and skilfully into the Hut last evening, and such a service should suffice for the present.  But, my mother tells me we have proper causes of complaint against you, for having so thoughtlessly left the place of safety into which you were brought, and for going strolling about the valley, after we had retired, in a very heedless and boyish manner!”

“I went with my father; surely I could not have been in better company.”

“At his suggestion, or at your own, Bob?” asked Maud, shaking her head.

“To own the truth, it was, in some degree, at my own.  It seemed so very unmilitary for two old soldiers to allow themselves to be shut up in ignorance of what their enemies were at, that I could not resist the desire to make a little sortie.  You must feel, dear Maud, that our motive was your safety—­the safety, I mean, of my mother, and Beulah, and nil of you together—­and you ought to be the last to blame us.”

The tint on Maud’s cheek deepened as Robert Willoughby laid so heavy an emphasis on “your safety;” but she could not smile on an act that risked so much more than was prudent.

“This is well enough as to motive,” she said, after a pause; “but frightfully ill-judged, I should think, as to the risks.  You do not remember the importance our dear father is to us all—­to my mother—­to Beulah—­even to me, Bob.”

“Even to you, Maud!—­And why not as much to you as to any of us?”

Maud could speak to Beulah of her want of natural affinity to the family; but, it far exceeded her self-command to make a direct allusion to it to Robert Willoughby.  Still, it was now rarely absent from her mind; the love she bore the captain and his wife, and Beulah, and little Evert, coming to her heart through a more insidious and possibly tenderer tie, than that of purely filial or sisterly affection.  It was, indeed, this every-day regard, strangely deepened and enlivened by that collateral feeling we so freely bestow on them who are bound by natural ties to those who have the strongest holds on our hearts, and which causes us to see with their eyes, and to feel with their affections.  Accordingly, no reply was made to the question; or, rather, it was answered by putting another.

“Did you see anything, after all, to compensate for so much risk?” asked Maud, but not until a pause had betrayed her embarrassment.