“Yes,” answered Brooke, wondering about the time of day, for the shadows had shifted greatly. “And be glad to see me when I return?” “Of course,” said Brooke, frankly; then, as other words struggled on Stead’s lips, blocking each other by haste, the pieman’s bell warned her that he had returned and was ready to start. Giving the last apple to Manfred, she freed her hand, stretching it vigorously, for it was almost numb, sent a hasty message to Dr. Russell, and fled out into the open. Robert Stead waited motionless for several minutes, looking after her; then, shaking himself as a horse does after a period of standing, he led Manfred to the wood road below, and prepared to make up for lost time. Yet for some strange reason he did not give the girl’s message to Dr. Russell, neither did he vouchsafe any explanation of the fact of there being only two trout in his basket, or prate about “fisherman’s luck” when the enthusiastic doctor showed ten beauties bedded in wet moss. There was enough light left on Brooke’s return for a survey of house, garden, and barns. It is strange when one goes away but seldom, that to find everything in place on the return and people doing as usual comes as a certain surprise. She opened the door of the old harness room to peep at her sketch of the horses. After a careful survey, she said to herself, “It is certainly true that one cannot judge work justly at the time it is done. Yesterday the neck of the young horse seemed all awry, but to-day it has exactly the toss and turn I was striving for.” As she closed the door she glanced down over the fields, but neither man nor horse was there, only a convocation of crows sitting on the fence. The pieman would doubtless have maintained that they were discussing among themselves the probable location of this season’s corn-fields. CHAPTER XVI THE WAY THE WIND BLEW However anxious the wife of Senator Parks had been to impress herself upon New York society, she experienced a delightful sense of relief when the winter of her novitiate was ended. Furling her banners of tactful triumph, she left town immediately after Easter, thereby doing the correct thing and following her own mood, a combination of rare accomplishment. Many times during the season she had thought of the Lawtons and missed Brooke sorely from the circle of bright young women in their “third and fourth winters,” whom she had the good sense as well as the attraction to draw about her; but the swirl of the pool had been so insistent that she had done little more than to send Brooke one or two cordial, if inconsiderate, notes of invitation to visit her, which of course had not been accepted.