“Is it far?” Adams enquired in a hopeless effort to extort information however meagre.

The boy looked important, almost mysterious.

“Yep,” he responded, adding immediately, “She’s the other side of the ferry.”

“Do you mean the lady?” He opened the door, and hurried to the sidewalk where he stopped to call a cab from the corner.

“She’s been there three nights, so tired she couldn’t move,” replied the boy, as he followed Adams into the cab.  “A fine lady, too,” he commented with a wink.

“Well, she’s all right now, and I’m much obliged to you,” said Adams, but he asked no further questions until they were seated side by side in the ferry, when he tried again to draw out the bare facts of Laura’s flight.

During the walk through the town and along the country road, he learned that Laura had reached the house of the boy’s mother in an exhaustion of mind and body which had compelled them to harbour her for the night.  On the next day her appearance and the money with which she was supplied had so won upon the mother’s sympathy that her desire to remain a few days longer had been met almost with eagerness by the older woman.  When he had, with difficulty, extracted this account of what had passed, Adams fell a little ahead of his companion, and they went on in silence until they came, at the end of several miles, in sight of the cottage withdrawn from the roadside in its clump of trees.  A single lighted window was visible through the bared boughs, and standing out clearly from the interior, Adams saw a dark figure which his heart recognised with a bound.

The boy pushed back the gate and Adams went up the path inside, and entering the house opened the door of the room in which he had seen Laura standing.  She was still there, motionless in the lamplight, and as he went toward her she lifted her eyes and gazed back at him in the mute defiance which is the outward expression of despair.

“Do you think you have been quite just to me, Laura?” he asked, not tenderly, but with a stern and reproachful face.

Without lowering her eyes she looked at him while she shook her head.

“I sent for you because I could not help it.  I had nowhere to go,” she said.

“Do you think you have been just to me?” he asked again.

“You?  I never thought of you until to-day,” she answered.  “I came here because I had to go somewhere—­it did not matter where.  I was too tired to walk any farther, so they were very good to me.”

“And you have let us search for you three days.”  His voice was constrained, but as he looked into her wan face between the loosened waves of her hair, his heart melted over her in an agony of tenderness.  Every drop of blood appeared to have left her body, which was so pallid that he seemed to see the light shining through her drawn features.

“So they have been looking for me?” she observed, with but little interest.