he could do it without exposing her to recognition.  The gray dawn came soon enough, and the coach drew up at “Red Chief” while the lights in the bar-room and dining-room of the hotel were still struggling with the far flushing east.  Cass alighted, placed Miss Mortimer in the hands of the landlady, and returned to the vehicle.  It was still musty, close, and frowzy, with half awakened passengers.  There was a vacated seat on the top, which Cass climbed up to, and abstractedly threw himself beside a figure muffled in shawls and rugs.  There was a slight movement among the multitudinous enwrappings, and then the figure turned to him and said dryly, “Good morning!” It was Miss Porter!

“Have you been long here?” he stammered.

“All night.”

He would have given worlds to leave her at that moment.  He would have jumped from the starting coach to save himself any explanation of the embarrassment he was furiously conscious of showing, without, as he believed, any adequate cause.  And yet, like all inexperienced, sensitive men, he dashed blindly into that explanation; worse, he even told his secret at once, then and there, and then sat abashed and conscience-stricken, with an added sense of its utter futility.

“And this,” summed up the young girl, with a slight shrug of her pretty shoulders, “is your May?”

Cass would have recommenced his story.

“No, don’t, pray!  It isn’t interesting, nor original.  Do you believe it?”

“I do,” said Cass, indignantly.

“How lucky!  Then let me go to sleep.”

Cass, still furious, but uneasy, did not again address her.  When the coach stopped at Blazing Star she asked him, indifferently:  “When does this sentimental pilgrimage begin?”

“I return for her at one o’clock,” replied Cass, stiffly.  He kept his word.  He appeased his eager companions with a promise of future fortune, and exhibited the present and tangible reward.  By a circuitous route known only to himself, he led Miss Mortimer to the road before the cabin.  There was a pink flush of excitement on her somewhat faded cheek.

“And it was here?” she asked, eagerly.

“I found it here.”

“And the body?”

“That was afterward.  Over in that direction, beyond the clump of buckeyes, on the Red Chief turnpike.”

“And any one coming from the road we left just now and going to—­to—­that place, would have to cross just here?  Tell me,” she said, with a strange laugh, laying her cold nervous hand on his, “wouldn’t they?”

“They would.”

“Let us go to that place.”

Cass stepped out briskly to avoid observation and gain the woods beyond the highway.  “You have crossed here before,” she said.  “There seems to be a trail.”

“I may have made it:  it’s a short cut to the buckeyes.”

“You never found anything else on the trail?”

“You remember, I told you before, the ring was all I found.”