“I would have those little paths which intersect every unoccupied field in this locality worn by the feet of these men and their children after them unto the third and fourth generation,” said Risley.  “If not, where is our skilled labor?”

“Oh, Mr. Risley,” said Mrs. Lloyd, anxiously, “you wouldn’t want all those dear little children to work as hard as their fathers, and not do any better, would you?”

“If they don’t, who is going to make our shoes, dear Mrs. Lloyd?” asked Risley.

Mrs. Lloyd and the school-master stared at him, and Lloyd laughed his low, almost mirthless laugh.

“Don’t you know, Edward,” he said, “that Mr. Risley is not in earnest, and speaks with the deadly intent of an anarchist with a bomb in his bag?  He is the most out-and-out radical in the country.  If there were a strike, and I did not yield to the demands of the oppressed, and imported foreign labor, I don’t know that my life would be safe from him.”

“Then you do approve of a higher education?” asked the school-master, while Mrs. Lloyd stared from one to the other in bewilderment.

“Yes, if we and our posterity have to go barefoot,” said Risley, laughing out with a sudden undertone of seriousness.

“I suppose everybody could get accustomed to going barefoot after a while,” said Mrs. Lloyd.  “Do you suppose that dear little thing was barefooted when she ran away, Cynthia?”

Risley answered as if he had been addressed.  “I can vouch for the fact that she was not, Mrs. Lloyd,” he said.  “They would sooner have walked on red-hot ploughshares themselves than let her.”

“Her father is getting quite an old man,” Norman Lloyd said, with no apparent relevancy, as if he were talking to himself.

All the time Cynthia Lennox had been quietly sitting at the head of the table.  When the rest of the company had gone, and she and Risley were alone, seated in the drawing-room before the parlor fire, for it was a chilly day, she turned her fair, worn face towards him on the crimson velvet of her chair.  “Do you know why I did not speak and tell them where the child was that time?” she asked.

“Because of your own good sense?”

“No; because of you.”

He looked at her adoringly.  She was older than he, her beauty rather recorded than still evident on her face; she had been to him from the first like a fair, forbidden flower behind a wall of prohibition, but nothing could alter his habit of loving her.

“Yes,” said she.  “It was more on your account than on my own; confession would be good for the soul.  The secret has always rankled in my pride.  I would much rather defy opinion than fly before it.  But I know that you would mind.  However, there was another reason.”

“What?”

She hesitated a little and colored, even laughed a little, embarrassed laugh which was foreign to her.  “Well, Lyman,” said she, finally, “one reason why I did not speak was that I see my way clear to making up to that child and her parents for any wrong which I may have done them by causing them a few hours’ anxiety.  When she has finished the high-school I mean to send her to college.”