“It is not your ready sympathy; you are quite certain it is not that, Elizabeth?”

“I am sure, father—­sure of myself as I am of him!  You say he has been arrested, does that mean—­” and she hesitated.

“It means, my dear, that he is in jail,” answered the general as he came slowly to his feet.

She gave a little cry, and running to him hid her face against his arm.

“In jail!” she moaned, and her imagination and her ignorance clothed the thought with indescribable horrors.

“Understand, dear, he isn’t even indicted yet and he may not be!  It’s bad enough, of course, but it might be a great deal worse.  Now what am I to tell him for you?”

“Wait,” she said, slipping from his side.  “I will write him—­”

“Write your letter then,” said her father.  “I’ll order the horses at once,” he added, as he quitted the room.

Ten minutes later when he drove up from the stables, Elizabeth met him at the door.

“After you have seen him, father, come home at once, won’t you?” she said as she handed him her letter.

“Yes, I am only going for this,” he replied.

It was plain that his errand had not grown less distasteful to him.  Perhaps Elizabeth was aware of this, for she reached up and passed an arm about his neck.

“I don’t believe any girl ever had such a father!” she whispered softly.

“I suppose I should not be susceptible to such manifest flattery,” said the general, kissing her, “but I find I am!  There, you keep up your courage!  This old father of yours is a person of such excellent sense that he is going to aid and abet you in this most outrageous folly; I expect, even, that in time, my interest in this very foolish young man will be only second to your own, my dear!”

As he drove away he turned in his seat to glance back at the graceful girlish figure standing in the shelter of Idle Hour’s stone arched vestibule, and as he did so there was a flutter of something white, which assured him that her keen eyes were following him and would follow him until the distance and the closing darkness intervened, and hid him from her sight.

“I hope it will come out all right!” he told himself and sighed.

If it did not come out all right, where was his peace of mind; where was the calm, where the long reposeful days he had so valued?  But this thought he put from him as unworthy.  After all Elizabeth’s happiness was something he desired infinitely more than he desired his own.  But why could it not have been some one else?  Why was it North; what unkind fate had been busy there?

“She sees more in him than I could ever see!” he said aloud, as he touched his horse with the whip.

Twenty minutes later he drove up before the court-house, hitched and blanketed his horse, and passing around the building, now dark and deserted, reached the entrance to the jail.  In the office he found Conklin at his desk.  The sheriff was rather laboriously engaged in making the entry in his ledger of North’s committal to his charge, a formality which, out of consideration for his prisoner’s feelings, he had dispensed with at the time of the arrest.