“What are you going to do with it?” he inquired, with an easy assumption of friendliness calculated to put her more completely at her ease with him. “I don’t know. For the present, I shall put it back in my desk.” “Better take my advice and destroy it,” he persisted. “It—er—is not valuable evidence. Or—I believe on second thought I shall accept your suggestion and return it myself to its probable owner.” He was actually laughing, his eyes brimming with boyish mischief. “I think it belongs to Miss Dix,” he told her audaciously. “To Miss Dix?” she echoed. “Yes; why not? Don’t you see the fair Ellen among the group?” Her eyes blazed suddenly upon him; her lips trembled. “Forgive me!” he cried, aghast at his own folly. She retreated before his outstretched hands. “I didn’t mean to—to make light of what appears so serious a matter to you,” he went on impetuously. “It is only that it is _not_ serious; don’t you see? It is such a foolish little mistake. It must not come between us, Lydia!” “Please go away, at once,” she interrupted him breathlessly, “and—and _think_ of what I have said to you. Perhaps you didn’t believe it; but you _must_ believe it!” Then, because he did not stir, but instead stood gazing at her, his puzzled eyes full of questions, entreaties, denials, she quietly closed a door between them. A moment later he heard her hurrying feet upon the stair. Chapter XV. August was a month of drought and intense heat that year; by the first week in September the stream had dwindled to the merest silver thread, its wasted waters floating upward in clouds of impalpable mist at dawn and evening to be lost forever in the empty vault of heaven. Behind the closed shutters of the village houses, women fanned themselves in the intervals of labor over superheated cookstoves. Men consulted their thermometers with incredulous eyes. Springs reputed to be unfailing gradually ceased their cool trickle. Wells and cisterns yielded little save the hollow sound of the questing bucket. There was serious talk of a water famine in Brookville. At the old Bolton house, however, there was still water in abundance. In jubilant defiance of blazing heavens and parching earth the Red-Fox Spring—tapped years before by Andrew Bolton and piped a mile or more down the mountain side, that his household, garden and stock might never lack of pure cold water—gushed in undiminished volume, filling and overflowing the new cement reservoir, which had been one of Lydia Orr’s cautious innovations in the old order of things.