kind of like her to fill your place.  Your sister has got a baby girl too.  She calls her Lizzie.  We couldn’t somehow have it natural to call her ’Lizabeth, and Nan wanted her called for me.  I was always Lizzie, you know.  Now you must write soon.

“Your loving mother,
Elizabeth Brady.”

There was no date nor address to the letter, but an address had been pencilled on the outside in her mother’s cramped school-girl hand.  It was dim but still readable, “Mrs. Elizabeth Brady, 18——­ Flora Street, Philadelphia.”

Elizabeth studied the last word, then drew out the envelope again, and looked at that.  Yes, the two names were the same.  How wonderful!  Perhaps she would sometime, sometime, see him again, though of course he belonged to the lady.  But perhaps, if she went to school and learned very fast, she might sometime meet him at church—­he went to church, she was sure—­and then he might smile, and not be ashamed of his friend who had saved his life.  Saved his life!  Nonsense!  She had not done much.  He would not feel any such ridiculous indebtedness to her when he got back to home and friends and safety.  He had saved her much more than she had saved him.

She put the papers all back in safety, and after having prepared her few belongings for taking up the journey, she knelt down.  She would say the prayer before she went on.  It might be that would keep the terrible pursuers away.

She said it once, and then with eyes still closed she waited a moment.  Might she say it for him, who was gone away from her?  Perhaps it would help him, and keep him from falling from that terrible machine he was riding on.  Hitherto in her mind prayers had been only for the dead, but now they seemed also to belong to all who were in danger or trouble.  She said the prayer over once more, slowly, then paused a moment, and added:  “Our Father, hide him from trouble.  Hide George Trescott Benedict.  And hide me, please, too.”

Then she mounted her horse, and went on her way.

It was a long and weary way.  It reached over mountains and through valleys, across winding, turbulent streams and broad rivers that had few bridges.  The rivers twice led her further south than she meant to go, in her ignorance.  She had always felt that Philadelphia was straight ahead east, as straight as one could go to the heart of the sun.

Night after night she lay down in strange homes, some poorer and more forlorn than others; and day after day she took up her lonely travel again.

Gradually, as the days lengthened, and mountains piled themselves behind her, and rivers stretched like barriers between, she grew less and less to dread her pursuers, and more and more to look forward to the future.  It seemed so long a way!  Would it never end?

Once she asked a man whether he knew where Philadelphia was.  She had been travelling then for weeks, and thought she must be almost there.  But he said “Philadelphia?  O, Philadelphia is in the East.  That’s a long way off.  I saw a man once who came from there.”