‘Yes,’ said Michael; and, indeed, there was a wild, if a joyous prospect around them. April green on the woods and grass, and April sunshine in the sky, and the river, which was, as she said, in spate, tearing along, many feet higher than usual, with brown, turbid waters, looking resistless in their swiftness and their strength. ‘Well,’ she next observed, in a muffled voice, ‘it’s far worse than I thought, and not better, as Miss Askam said it would be. It makes me sure that I’m right.’ ‘Right in what, Ada?’ ‘In what I thought about facing the people again.’ ‘It is the first step that costs. In time you will mind it less. It is well that you tried it.’ ‘Perhaps it is. It is well to make sure of things,’ said Ada, in a stronger voice. ‘But I’ll never do it again. I’ll never be stared at and whispered about in that way, any more. They would like to throw stones at me, if they dared. If I’d been alone, I daresay they would have done.’ ‘You wrong them——’ ‘What does it matter?’ she said, coldly, as she stooped to pick a tuft of small flowers from the grassy bank of the river. Then she paused a moment, picking them to pieces, and seemed absorbed in reflection upon what she had felt in passing through the town. Suddenly she looked up at Michael, and said— ‘There’s one thing I should like to say, Dr. Langstroth. _You_ are a man, whatever the rest may be; and I always knew you were; and it was because I always felt you were so high above me that I used to say such ill-natured things of you to Roger. I knew that you saw through me, if he didn’t; but you never betrayed me. However, it will be all the same to you. I can’t hurt you or help you, one way or another—so good-bye.’ With that she slipped past him, with a darting movement which eluded his grasp, ran down the bank of the river, stood for one moment poised for the spring she took, and the next instant he saw her swept like a reed, many yards away, down the giant current of the stream. ‘Fool that I was!’ he muttered, turning instinctively to rush down the stream, and if possible, go beyond her, before he plunged in, so that he could meet and intercept her. But Gilbert met him at the corner of the bridge. There was a curious look in his eyes, and his hand held back Michael by the arm, with a grip in which the latter felt powerless. ‘Your way is over the bridge,’ he said. ‘Go and meet us. Eleanor sent _me_.’