She held out her hand, there in the rain on the black cinder-path, and William King struck his into it with a sort of shout. "Hurrah!" he said, as she had said when they had come out from hearing the sentence in the Mercer doctor's office. The long ride home in the stage, in which they were the only passengers, was perhaps a descending scale.... At first they talked of the circus. "I liked the man and the bear best," William said. "Oh, he wasn't as fine as that beautiful lady in pink petticoats who rode the fat, white horse. Did you ever see a horse with so broad a back, Willy? Why, I could have ridden him myself." "He would need a broad back," William said; and Miss Harriet told him to hold his tongue and not be impudent. The rain was pattering on the roof and streaming down the windows, and in the dark, damp cavern of the stage they could not see each other's face very well; but the stretches of tense silence in the circus talk made William King's heart beat heavily, although he burst out gayly that the afternoon had brought back his youth. "Miss Harriet, when you were a child, didn't you always want to poke around under the seats when it was over and find things? William Rives once found five cents. But William would find five cents in the Desert of Sahara. I never had his luck, but I was confident that watches were dropped freely by the spectators." "Of course," cried Miss Harriet. "Or diamond-rings. My fancy led me towards diamond-rings. But I suppose you never knew the envy of the ladies' clothes? Dear me--those petticoats!" "The ring-master's boots were very bitter to me; but my greatest desire was--" "Willy," Miss Harriet said, hoarsely, "I don't want anybody to know." "Of course not," William King said. "Why should they? We may hold this thing at bay for--" "We will hold it at bay," she said, with passion. "I will! I _will_! Do you hear me?" Willy King murmured something inarticulately; his eyes suddenly smarted. The ride to Old Chester seemed to him interminable; and when, after wandering snatches of talk about the circus, the stage at last drew up at the green gate in Miss Harriet's privet hedge, his nerves were tense and his face haggard with fatigue. At home, at his belated supper-table, his good Martha was very severe with him. "You oughtn't to allow yourself to get so tired; it's wrong. You could just as well as not have ordered your things by mail. I must say, William, flatly and frankly, that a doctor ought to have more sense. I hope there was nobody in the stage you knew to talk you to death?" "Miss Harriet came down," William said, "but she hadn't much to say."