’I have been considering a difficulty, Miss Hazel; will you help me out?’

‘Gladly, sir, if I can.’  She had been sitting in musing idleness, going over the day perhaps, for now and then her lips curled and parted, with various expressions.

’We have come, you are aware, Miss Hazel, in the course of our progress, to the Enchanted Region;—­where things are not what they seem; jewels lie hid in the soil for the finding, and treasures are at the top of the hill; but the conditions of success may be the stopping of the ears, you know; and lovely ladies by the way may turn out to be deadly enchantresses.  How, in this time of dangers and possibilities, can my wisdom avail for your inexperience? that is my question.  Can you tell me?’

‘Truly sir,’ she answered with laugh, ’to get yourself out of a difficulty, you get me in!  My inexperience is totally in the dark as to what your wisdom means.’

‘Precisely,’ said Mr. Falkirk; ’so how shall we do?  How shall I take care of you?’

‘You have always known how, sir,’ she answered with a grateful flash of her brown eyes.

’When I had only a little Wych Hazel to take care of, and the care depended on myself,’ Mr. Falkirk said, with just an indication of a sigh stifled somewhere.  ’Now I can’t get along without your cooeperation, my dear.’

’Am I so much harder to manage than of old, sir?  That speaks ill for me.’

’My dear, I believe I remarked that we are upon Enchanted ground.  It does not speak ill for you, that you may not know a bewitched pumpkin from a good honest piece of carriage maker’s work.’

’No, sir.  Is it the pumpkin variety for which Mr. Rollo is to find mice?’

‘I have taken care of your affairs at least,’ said Mr. Falkirk gravely.  ’There is nothing about them that is not sound.  I wish other people did not know it so well!’ he muttered.

‘It is only poor little me,’ said Wych Hazel.  ’Never mind, sir,—­in fairy tales one always comes out somehow.  But I am sure I ought to be “sound” too, if care would do it.’

‘Will you help me, Hazel?’ said Mr. Falkirk, bending towards her and speaking her name as in the old childish days.

’Gladly, sir,—­if you will shew me how.  And if it is not too hard,’ she said with a pretty look, well answering to her words.

‘I wish you had a mother!’ said Mr. Falkirk abruptly.  And he turned back to the table, and for a little while that was all the answer he made; while Wych Hazel sat waiting.  But then he began again.

’As I remarked before, Miss Hazel, we are come upon bewitched ground in our search after fortune.  You spoke of two classes of people a while ago, if you remember—­people that want to marry each other and people that don’t.’

‘Yes sir.  Which are the most of?’

’Being upon bewitched ground, it might happen to you as to others—­mind, not this year, perhaps, nor next; but it might happen—­that you should find yourself in one of these two, as you intimate, large classes.  Suppose it; could you, having no mother, put confidence in an old guardian?’