When she and her big sister reached the river they differed as to the next step, Dottie desiring to go on into the water, and Sophia deeming it expedient to go back over the field.  As each was in an indolent mood, they both gave way a little and split the difference by wandering along the waterside, conversing softly about many things—­as to how long it would take the seed of the four-o’clock to “sail away, away, over the river,” and why a nice brown frog that they came across was not getting ready for bed like the birdies.  There is no such sweet distraction as an excursion into Children’s Land, and Sophia wandered quite away with this talkative baby, until she found herself suddenly cast out of Dottie’s magic province as she stood beyond the trees that edged the first field not far from the fence of the Harmon garden.  And that which had broken the spell was the appearance of Alec Trenholme.  He came right up to her, as if he had something of importance to say, but either shyness or a difficulty in introducing his subject made him hesitate.  Something in his look caused her to ask lightly: 

“Have you seen a ghost?”

“Yes.”

“Are you in earnest?”

“I am in earnest, and,” added he, somewhat dubiously, “I think I am in my right mind.”

He did not say more just then, but looked up and down the road in his search for someone.  In a moment he turned to her, and a current of amusement seemed to cross his mind and gleamed out of his blue eyes as he lifted them to hers.  “I believe when I saw you I came to you for protection.”

The light from pink tracts of sunset fell brightly upon field and river, but this couple did not notice it at all.

“There is no bogie so fearful as the unknown,” she cried.  “You frightened me, Mr. Trenholme.”

“There is no bogie in the case,” he said, “nor ghost I suppose; but I saw someone.  I don’t know how to tell you; it begins so far back, and I may alarm you when I tell you that there must be someone in this neighbourhood of yours who has no right to be here.”  Then to her eager listening he told the story that he had once written to his brother, and added to it the unlooked for experience of the last half-hour.  His relation lacked clearness of construction.  Sophia had to make it lucid by short quick questions here and there.

“I’m no good,” he concluded, deprecating his own recital.  “Robert has all the language that’s in our family; but do you know, miss, what it is to see a face, and know that you know it again, though you can’t say what it was like?  Have you the least notion how you would feel on being fooled a second time like that?”

The word of address that he had let fall struck her ear as something inexplicable which she had not then time to investigate; she was aware, too, that, as he spoke fast and warmly, his voice dropped into some vulgarity of accent that she had not noticed in it before.  These thoughts glanced through her mind, but found no room to stay, for there are few things that can so absorb for the time a mind alive to its surroundings as a bit of genuine romance, a fragment of a life, or lives, that does not seem to bear explanation by the ordinary rules of our experience.