As he drew nearer, what might have been some frightened animal started through the crackling limbs.  It ran up the tossed arms of the fallen monarch and sheltered itself in some friendly foliage.  The master, reaching the old seat, found the nest still warm; looking up in the intertwining branches, he met the black eyes of the errant Mliss.  They gazed at each other without speaking.  She was first to break the silence.

“What do you want?” she asked curtly.

The master had decided on a course of action.  “I want some crab apples,” he said humbly.

“Sha’n’t have ’em! go away.  Why don’t you get ’em of Clytemnerestera?” (It seemed to be a relief to Mliss to express her contempt in additional syllables to that classical young woman’s already long-drawn title.) “O you wicked thing!”

“I am hungry, Lissy.  I have eaten nothing since dinner yesterday.  I am famished!” and the young man in a state of remarkable exhaustion leaned against the tree.

Melissa’s heart was touched.  In the bitter days of her gypsy life she had known the sensation he so artfully simulated.  Overcome by his heartbroken tone, but not entirely divested of suspicion, she said: 

“Dig under the tree near the roots, and you’ll find lots; but mind you don’t tell,” for Mliss had her hoards as well as the rats and squirrels.

But the master, of course, was unable to find them; the effects of hunger probably blinding his senses.  Mliss grew uneasy.  At length she peered at him through the leaves in an elfish way, and questioned: 

“If I come down and give you some, you’ll promise you won’t touch me?”

The master promised.

“Hope you’ll die if you do!”

The master accepted instant dissolution as a forfeit.  Mliss slid down the tree.  For a few moments nothing transpired but the munching of the pine nuts.  “Do you feel better?” she asked, with some solicitude.  The master confessed to a recuperated feeling, and then, gravely thanking her, proceeded to retrace his steps.  As he expected, he had not gone far before she called him.  He turned.  She was standing there quite white, with tears in her widely opened orbs.  The master felt that the right moment had come.  Going up to her, he took both her hands, and looking in her tearful eyes, said, gravely, “Lissy, do you remember the first evening you came to see me?”

Lissy remembered.

“You asked me if you might come to school, for you wanted to learn something and be better, and I said—­”

“Come,” responded the child, promptly.

“What would you say if the master now came to you and said that he was lonely without his little scholar, and that he wanted her to come and teach him to be better?”

The child hung her head for a few moments in silence.  The master waited patiently.  Tempted by the quiet, a hare ran close to the couple, and raising her bright eyes and velvet forepaws, sat and gazed at them.  A squirrel ran halfway down the furrowed bark of the fallen tree, and there stopped.