“No, I started so hurriedly.”

“Well, I will go in the office way.  I know where Uncle Tom keeps brandy, and I will be so chilled that I’ll have to take a little before mother sees me.  That will make me all right.  I wouldn’t take it for myself, but I will for her.”

“And you are chilled, all right,” said James.

“Yes, I think I am,” said Clemency.  “I did not think of it, but I guess it was cold there in the woods keeping still so long.”  Indeed, the girl was shaking from head to foot, both with cold and nervous terror.  “It was awful,” she said in a little whisper.

James felt the girl shaking from head to foot.  Suddenly a great tenderness for the poor, little hunted thing came over him.  He put his arm around her.  “Poor little soul,” he said.  “It must have been terrible for you lying out there in the cold and dark and not knowing—­”

Clemency shrank into his embrace as a hurt child might have done.  “It was perfectly terrible,” she said, with a little sob.  “I didn’t know but he might come back any minute and find me.”

“It is all over now,” James said soothingly.

“Yes, for the time,” Clemency replied with a little note of despair in her voice, “but there is something about it all that I don’t understand.  Only think how long I have had to stay in the house, and he must have been on the watch.  I don’t know when it is ever going to end.”

“I think that I will end it to-morrow,” said James with fierce resolution.

“You?  How?”

“I am going to put a stop to this.  If an innocent girl can’t step out of the house for weeks at a time without being hounded this way, it is high time something was done.  I am going to get a posse of men and scour the country for the scoundrel.”

“Oh, will you do that?”

“Yes, I will.  It is high time somebody did something.”

“You saw him.  You know just how he looks?”

“I could tell him from a thousand.”

Clemency drew a long breath.  “Well,” she said doubtfully, “if you can, but—­”

“But what?”

“Nothing, only somehow I doubt if Uncle Tom will think it advisable.  There must be some mystery about all this or Uncle Tom himself would have done that very thing at first.  I don’t understand it.  But I don’t believe Uncle Tom will consent to your hunting for the man.  I think for some reason he wants it kept secret.”  Suddenly, Clemency gave a passionate little outcry.  “Oh, how I do hate secrets!” she said.  “How I have always hated them!  I want everything right out, and here I seem to be in a perfect snarl of secrets!  I wonder how long I shall have to stay in the house.”

“Perhaps you are wrong, and your uncle will take measures now this has happened for the second time,” said James.

“No, he won’t,” replied the girl hopelessly.  “I am almost sure that he will not.”