We could easily have arranged to meet at Quickster, which is about the same distance from him that it is from me. But a ride of twenty miles, most of them slow ones, beside a man with whom you are not in full sympathy, is a trial. I did not feel called upon to undergo it for him. When he took leave of me, he again seemed about to propose something, and I felt it was this plan which was so natural; but he was again withheld, by pride or by delicacy. Either feeling I could sympathize with, and I was more touched by this reserve than by all his friendly advances; but I hardened my heart. He mounted his horse. I saw him go slowly down the path to the road, stoop from the saddle to open the gate,--pass out. And then I was seized with sudden compunction. I heard the slow step of his horse, receding as if reluctantly, and ready to be checked at a hint. I ran to the gate. Frederic was just turning away, as if he had been looking back, expecting to see me; but in the same instant he gave an intimation to his horse, and was out of the reach of my repentance. "_I liked him._" With Harry these words mean a great deal. Could Harry ever have liked him, if he had not been worthy to be liked? How sad his look was, when he spoke of his happy boyish days!--happier than these only because they were blameless. Was not this regret itself an earnest of the power of return? He had good blood in him. He is Charles Shaler's cousin. He has a weak, shallow mother,--a father whose good qualities and whose faults are overlaid with the same worldly varnish impartially. He feels the need of other influences, and clings to Harry. He comes to me instinctively seeking something he has not in his home. My mother has always judged him more kindly than I have. If he had been a poor outcast child, I should have felt his coming to me so frankly and so persistently to be a sign I was to do something for him. Is there a greater need than that of sympathy and honest counsel? I have been selfish, but this pain is punishment enough. I feel a remorse surely out of proportion to my sin. I do not prevent his going to meet Harry by not asking him to go with me. He is not one to give up his wish; and in this case there is no reason that he should. He will arrive; I am sure of it. And I will atone, at least in part. I will ask him to join me on the ride home. Old Jasper has told me stories of Frederic Harvey's good-heartedness in childhood: tells them to me, indeed, every time he sees me. I remember one in particular, of the pretty little boy in his foreign dress, and speaking his foreign language, carrying his own breakfast one morning to the cabin where the old man lay sick; and another of his taking away part of her load from a feeble woman; and another of his falling on a driver and wresting from him the whip with which he was lashing a fainting boy. But Jasper has only these early stories to tell of him; and what different ones are current now!