“He has followed us!” breathed Nita.  “Oh, dear me!” and she pressed her handkerchief to her eyes.

“If you cry we will tell him you are too ill to walk, and then, maybe he’ll offer to carry you,” blurted out Edna.  “If one insists on being a baby, she must be babied.”

This charge rather frightened Nita back to courage, or at least she pretended to it, for she promptly quickened her pace, and even hid away her handkerchief.

Tavia, too, saw the strange man as he emerged, seemingly, from nowhere, for she started on a run, laughing uproariously at the herd of sheep that trotted as she increased her pace, turned as she turned, and, in fact, seemed to be at a regular game of “follow the leader.”

The young man stood carefully posed in the path, just where a huge stone afforded him a setting for his rather dusty boots.

“What a chap!” commented Edna.  “Seems to me he has enough strikes and poses to make a good cigar box picture.”

“Any particular brand?” asked Dorothy.  “I might label it ‘Spectacular,’ with all rights reserved.”

“Look at Tavia,” begged Cologne with a smile.  “The rights are ‘reserved’ in her particular direction.”

“She’s welcome,” finished Dorothy, just as Tavia reached the spot where the other girls were now waiting, and where the young man stood like a statue.

“Another situation?” remarked the man, doffing his hat in the most gorgeous bow.

“Yes, the climax,” answered Tavia.  “What do you think of the scenery?”

“Mercy!” breathed Edna aside.  “If they start that sort of talk we may as well camp out to-night.”

But the young man did not express his opinion publicly.  Instead, he stepped up to Tavia, and presently the two were conversing in subdued voices.

Dorothy did not like that.  She, in fact, did not fancy this young man’s “apparition” habit, and she now determined to force Tavia to a sense of her own obligations to reach Glenwood School without further delay.

“Girls,” called Dorothy, “we really must hurry!  Thank you, very much” (this to the strange man), “for your kindness this afternoon, but you see now, we have to get back to school.  We would not have been out so long but for the fact that this is privilege day—­school closes Thursday.”

“Then why not make use of the privilege?” the young man asked, with a sly look at Tavia.  “We don’t meet—­professional friends every afternoon.”

The thought that Tavia might have met this man while engaged in her brief and notable stage career, as related in “Dorothy Dale’s Great Secret,” flashed across Dorothy’s mind.  With it came a thought of danger—­Tavia was scarcely yet cured of her dramatic fever.

The sheep stood around in the most serio-comic style, and the seminary girls were scarcely less comic.

“Oh!” screamed Nita, suddenly, “there comes that awful farmer!  And he has a whip!”