“Quite a strange meeting,” said he, “between you and Miss Royall.”

“Yes,” said I, thinking it over, from that first wolf-hunted approach to my camp to our yesterday of clouds and sunshine; “I never had anything like it happen to me.”

“Mrs. Thorndyke,” said he, “is a mighty smart woman.  She knows what’ll do, and what won’t do better than—­than any of us.”

I wasn’t ready to admit this, and therefore said nothing.

“Don’t you think so?” he asked.

“I do’ know,” I said, a little sullenly.

“A girl,” said he, “has a pretty hard time in life if she loses her reputation.”

Again I made no reply.

“You are just two thoughtless children,” said he; “aren’t you now?”

“She’s nothing,” said I, “but a little innocent child!”

“Now that’s so,” said he, “that’s so; but after all she’s old enough so that evil things might be thought of her—­evil things might be said; and there’d be no answer to them, no answer.  Why, she’s a woman grown—­a woman grown; and as for you, you’re getting a beard.  This won’t do, you know; it is all right if there were just you and Miss Royall and my wife and me in the world; but you wouldn’t think for a minute of traveling with this little girl the way you have been—­the way you speak of doing, I mean—­if you knew that in the future, when she must make her way in the world with nothing’ but her friends, this little boy-and-girl experience might take her friends from her; and when she will have nothing but her good name you don’t want, and would not for the world have anything thoughtlessly done now, that might take her good name from her.  You are too young to understand this as you will some day——­”

“The trouble with me,” I blurted out, “is that I’ve never had much to do with good women—­only with my mother and Mrs. Fogg—­and they could never have anything said against them—­neither of them!”

“Where have you lived all your life?” he asked.

Then I told him of the way I had picked up my hat and come up instead of being brought up, of the women along the canal, of her who called herself Alice Rucker, of the woman who stole across the river with me—­but I didn’t mention her name—­of as much as I could think of in my past history; and all the time Elder Thorndyke gazed at me with increasing interest, and with something the look we have in listening to tales of midnight murder and groaning ghosts.  I must have been an astonishing sort of mystery to him.  Certainly I was a castaway and an outcast to his ministerial mind; and boy as I was, he seemed to feel for me a sort of awed respect mixed up a little with horror.

“Heavenly Father!” he blurted out.  “You have escaped as by the skin of your teeth.”

“I do’ know,” said I.

“But don’t you understand,” he insisted, “that this, trip has got to end here?  Suppose your mother, when she was a child in fact, but a woman grown also, like Miss Royall, had been placed as she is with a boy of your age and one who had lived your life——­”