The next day he took the train for Canandaigua, where he spent the night, and the following morning drove himself out to Allen’s Hill, just as he had done once before, when Edna as now was the object he sought. There was no soap boiling in the caldron kettle this time, and no Macbethian witch bending over it in wonderful costume, as Roy came round the corner of the church, and tied his horse to the post. Aunt Jerry was expecting him, and welcomed him cordially, and invited him in, and then tortured him by talking for ten or fifteen minutes upon every topic but the one uppermost in his mind. At last, when he could wait no longer, he said to her, abruptly: “Your niece wrote me that she would meet me here any day this week, and I have lost no time in coming. She will not disappoint me now, I trust. I am very anxious to find her.” “Yes, I s’pose so. She’s here, though not in the house this minute. She went to the woods an hour or so ago.” “Can I find her there, do you think? Show me the way, please, and I’ll try it,” Roy said with sudden animation, rising to his feet, and seeming full of eagerness and impatience. It could not have been anything in Aunt Jerry’s manner which communicated itself to him, nor anything in the atmosphere of the house. It was rather a presentiment of the coming happiness, a remembrance of Uncle Phil’s demeanor and mysterious hints, which, put together, came over Roy with a sudden suspicion of the truth, or rather a suspicion that it might be just possible, nothing more. It was too delightful a possibility to be true; and he must not harbor the hope for a moment, he said to himself, as, waiting only for Aunt Jerry’s somewhat indefinite directions, he started for the west woods, where Edna was to be found. “There’s a brook down there, and a bank under a tree: maybe you’ll find her there,” Aunt Jerry had said, and Roy kept on his way down the hill, past the site of the old school-house where Edna had learned her alphabet; through the bars, which he did not wait to let down, but over which he vaulted at one bound; and on across the grassy patch until the border of the woods was reached, and there he paused a moment to look about and reconnoitre a little.