“All right,” said Wynn, with an apparent accession of boisterous geniality.  “Tell her I must see her, and I’ve only got a few minutes to spare.  Tell her to slip on anything and come down; there’s no one here but myself, and I’ve shut the front door on Brother Burnham.  Ha, ha!” and suiting the action to the word, he actually bundled the admiring Brother Burnham out on his own doorstep.  There was a light pattering on the staircase, and Nellie Wynn, pink with sleep, very tall, very slim, hastily draped in a white counterpane with a blue border and a general classic suggestion, slipped into the parlor.  At the same moment the father shut the door behind her, placed one hand on the knob, and with the other seized her wrist.

“Where were you yesterday?” he asked.

Nellie looked at him, shrugged her shoulders, and said, “Here.”

“You were in the Carquinez Woods with Low Dorman; you went there in disguise; you’ve met him there before.  He is your clandestine lover; you have taken pledges of affection from him; you have”—­

“Stop!” she said.

He stopped.

“Did he tell you this?” she asked, with an expression of disdain.

“No; I overheard it.  Dunn and Brace were at the house waiting for you.  When the coach did not bring you, I went to the office to inquire.  As I left our door I thought I saw somebody listening at the parlor windows.  It was only a drunken Mexican muleteer leaning against the house; but if he heard nothing, I did.  Nellie, I heard Brace tell Dunn that he had tracked you in your disguise to the woods—­do you hear? that when you pretended to be here with the girls you were with Low—­alone; that you wear a ring that Low got of a trader here; that there was a cabin in the woods”—­

“Stop!” she repeated.

Wynn again paused.

“And what did you do?” she asked.

“I heard they were starting down there to surprise you and him together, and I harnessed up and got ahead of them in my buggy.”

“And found me here,” she said, looking full into his eyes.

He understood her and returned the look.  He recognized the full importance of the culminating fact conveyed in her words, and was obliged to content himself with its logical and worldly significance.  It was too late now to take her to task for mere filial disobedience; they must become allies.

“Yes,” he said hurriedly; “but if you value your reputation, if you wish to silence both these men, answer me fully.”

“Go on,” she said.

“Did you go to the cabin in the woods yesterday?”

“No.”

“Did you ever go there with Low?”

“No; I do not know even where it is.”

Wynn felt that she was telling the truth.  Nellie knew it; but as she would have been equally satisfied with an equally efficacious falsehood, her face remained unchanged.

“And when did he leave you?”