“I’ve been thinking, too,” she said, simply.

“It’s after six,” Blondin said with a glance about.  “We can’t talk here.  Can you get away?  Can we go somewhere?”

Without another word she deserted her seat, pinned on her hat, and picked up her gloves.

“There’s a very quiet back road straight to Crownlands,” she said, considering.  “We might walk.”

“Anything!” he assented, briefly.

Guided by Harriet, who was familiar with the place, they slipped through the hallway, and out a side door, crossing the lane that led down to the garage, and striking into a splendid old quiet roadway barred now by the shadows of elms and sycamores and maples, and filled with soft green lights from the thick arch of new leaves.  They had no sooner gained the silence and solitude it afforded them than the man began deliberately: 

“Harriet, I’ve not thought of anything else since I came upon you yesterday, after all these years.  I want you to tell me that you—­ you aren’t angry with me.”

There was a moment of silence.  Then the girl said, quietly: 

“No.  I’m not angry, Roy.”

“You knew—­you knew how desperately I tried to find you, Harriet?  What a hell I went through?”

If she had steeled herself against the possibility of his shaking her, she failed herself now.  It was with an involuntary and bitter little laugh that she said: 

“You had no monopoly of that, Roy.”

“But you ran away from me!” he accused her.  “When I went to find you, they told me the Davenports had moved away.  Won’t you believe that I felt terribly—­that I walked the streets, Harriet, praying--praying!—­that I might catch a glimpse of you.  It was the uppermost thought for years—­how many years?  Seven?”

“More than eight,” she corrected, in a somewhat lifeless voice.  “I was eighteen.  My one thought, my one hope, when I last saw you, in Linda’s house,” she went on, with sudden passion, “was that I would never see you again!  But I’m glad to hear you say this, Roy,” she added, in a gentler tone.  “I’m glad you—­felt sorry.  Our going away was a mere chance.  Fred Davenport was offered a position on a Brooklyn paper, and we all moved from Watertown to Brooklyn.  I was grateful for it; I only wanted to disappear!  Linda stood by me, her children saved my life.  I was a nursery-maid for a year or two—­I never saw anybody, or went anywhere!  I think Linda’s friends thought her sister was queer, melancholy, or weakminded—­God knows I was, too!  I look back,” Harriet said, talking more to herself than to him, and walking swiftly along in the golden sunset light that streamed across the old back road, “and I wonder I didn’t go stark, staring mad!  Strange streets, strange houses, and myself wheeling Pip Davenport about the curbs and past the little shops!”

“Don’t think about it,” he urged, with concern.

“No; I’ll not think about it.  Royal, don’t think that all my feeling was for myself.  I thought of you, too.  I missed you.  Truly, I missed what you had given my life!”