Recovering his power of motion as quickly as he had lost it, Brownell darted down the lane toward the barn, and opening the door of the first outbuilding that he reached, sprang in, closing it quickly behind him with a heedless bang, in all the guilty trepidation of some peeping Tom in fear of justice. In reality the being that Brownell most feared at that moment was himself, as rendered illogical, helpless, and oblivious of even the carefully planned work of his life, when in close proximity to Lucy Dean. If she turned and saw him, he knew himself lost, so that immediate flight was the only hope left. From the moment he had first met her Brownell had admired her stanch friendship for Brooke, while her buoyant and frank audacity had soon fairly swept him off his feet. He had gone to the Dean house many times, it is true, half because not to do so would have been brutally rude, half fluttering, moth-in-the-candle fashion and courting a singeing, until in the close companionship of the six weeks’ journey that had been proposed, he saw that he would not only be at bay, but completely at the mercy of that most uncertain of quantities, the motherless daughter of an influential and wealthy man. As an institution he had no quarrel with matrimony,—simply it had no place at present in his somewhat altruistic plan of work. He did not wish either to love or to marry; to see Lucy had cast him into the former state, and caused matrimony to fill the entire vista. What had he to offer—that is, financially? Even with his promotion he could little more than compete with her father’s _chef_. Of himself he had but an indifferent opinion, which was unwise, merely his ambitions were so far ahead of his achievements that he measured his shortcomings by the discrepancy. That Lucy delighted to compete with him in a sort of game that Brooke had called “truth telling” he knew, also that in some way he seemed to stimulate her wit; but that there was a grain of sentiment in her practical, and what people thought somewhat hard, nature, he never for a moment dreamed. Therefore, knowing that if he saw her often the moment would come when from his own standpoint he must become ridiculous in her eyes, he had escaped from the overland trip, as he now sought to escape the sudden and unexpected meeting by flight.