“Yes, sir, I am,” replied Bessie, like a veritable echo of himself.

“Then, as we are travelling the same road, you will be our guide, eh?”

“The children are little; they cannot keep pace with men on horseback,” said Bessie.  They were a mile and a half from Beechhurst yet.  Mr. John Short spoke hastily in an endeavor to promote an understanding, and blundered worse than his client:  his suggestion was that they might each take up one of the bairns; but the expression of Bessie’s eyes was a reminder that she might not please to trudge at their bridle, though the little and weak ones were to be carried.

“You are considering who is to take you up?” hazarded Mr. Fairfax.

Bessie recovered her countenance and said, as she would have said to any other strangers on horseback who might have invited her to be their guide on foot, “You cannot miss the way.  It lies straight before you for nearly a mile over the heath; then you will come to cross-roads and a guide-post.  You will be at Beechhurst long before we shall.”

The gentlemen accepted their dismissal and rode on.  Was Bessie mollified at all by the mechanical courtesy with which their hats were lifted at their departure?  They recognized, then, that she was not the little gypsy they had hailed her.  It did not enter into her imagination that they had recognized also the true Fairfax face under her dishevelled holiday locks, though she was persuaded that the one who had asked her name was her wicked grandfather:  that her grandfather was a wicked man Bessie had quite made up her mind.  Mr. John Short admired her behavior.  It did not chafe his dignity or alarm him for the peace of his future life.  But Mr. Fairfax was not a man of humor; he saw no fun whatever in his prospects with that intrepid child, who had evidently inherited not the Fairfax face only, but the warm Fairfax temper.

“Do you suppose that she guessed who we are?” he asked his man of law.

“Yes, but she did not add to that the probability that we knew that she guessed it, though she looks quick enough.”

Mr. Fairfax was not flattered:  “I don’t love a quick woman.  A quick woman is always self-willed and wanting in feminine sweetness.”

“There was never a Fairfax yet, man or woman, of mean understanding,” said the lawyer.  “Since the little girl has the family features, the chances are that she has the family brains, and no lack of wit and spirit.”

Mr. Fairfax groaned.  He held the not uncommon opinion that wit and spirit endanger a man’s peace and rule in a house.  And yet in the case of his son Laurence’s Xantippe he had evidence enough that nothing in nature is so discordant and intractable as a fool.  Then he fell into a silence, and turned his horse off the highway upon the margin of sward at one side of it.  Mr. John Short took the other; and so Bessie and the boys soon lost sight of them.