Miss Trotter’s obvious thought was that Frida knew on which side her bread was buttered; but remembering that the proprietor was a widower, it occurred to her that the young woman might also have it buttered on both sides.  Her momentary fancy of uniting two lovers somehow weakened at this suggestion, and there was a hardening of her face as she said, “Well, if you can’t trust her, perhaps your brother may be right.”

“I don’t say that, Miss Trotter,” said Chris pleadingly, yet with a slight wincing at her words; “You could convince her, if you would only try.  Only let her see that she has some other friends beside myself.  Look!  Miss Trotter, I’ll leave it all to you—­there!  If you will only help me, I will promise not to see her—­not to go near her again—­until you have talked with her.  There!  Even my brother would not object to that.  And if he has every confidence in you, I’m showing you I’ve more—­don’t you see?  Come, now, promise—­won’t you, dear Miss Trotter?” He again took her hand, and this time pressed a kiss upon her slim fingers.  And this time she did not withdraw them.  Indeed, it seemed to her, in the quick recurrence of her previous sympathy, as if a hand had been put into her loveless past, grasping and seeking hers in its loneliness.  None of her school friends had ever appealed to her like this simple, weak, and loving young man.  Perhaps it was because they were of her own sex, and she distrusted them.

Nevertheless, this momentary weakness did not disturb her good common sense.  She looked at him fixedly for a moment, and then said, with a faint smile, “Perhaps she does not trust you.  Perhaps you cannot trust yourself.”

He felt himself reddening with a strange embarrassment.  It was not so much the question that disturbed him as the eyes of Miss Trotter; eyes that he had never before noticed as being so beautiful in their color, clearness, and half tender insight.  He dropped her hand with a new-found timidity, and yet with a feeling that he would like to hold it longer.

“I mean,” she said, stopping short in the trail at a point where a fringe of almost impenetrable “buckeyes” marked the extreme edge of the woods,—­“I mean that you are still very young, and as Frida is nearly your own age,”—­she could not resist this peculiarly feminine innuendo,—­“she may doubt your ability to marry her in the face of opposition; she may even think my interference is a proof of it; but,” she added quickly, to relieve his embarrassment and a certain abstracted look with which he was beginning to regard her, “I will speak to her, and,” she concluded playfully, “you must take the consequences.”