When she awoke on the following day her first move was to the window with an anxious look at the sky. As soon as she was satisfied that it was not threatening, a reaction set in to her thought. She always hastened to dress in the morning, for her compassion for Mrs. Carder made her hurry to her assistance. Pete's eyes in this few days had taken on a seeing look and he worked with energy to follow every direction of his golden-haired goddess. In the kitchen he did not avoid her eyes, and the smiles he received from her were the only sunbeams that had ever come into his life. She was in many minds that morning about going again to the meadow. It seemed so absurd, so humiliating to costume herself as for private theatricals, and to go repeatedly to keep a tryst which the other party, and that a man, had forgotten. Would the princess in the fairy tale do so? she wondered; but then if she had not persisted the story could never have been written. "Ain't you sick o' that meadow and the cows?" asked Rufus at the dinner-table. "Hadn't you better go drivin' to-day? I've got an errand to the village and just as lieve do it myself as send one o' the men if you'll go." Geraldine, the two braids of her hair brought up around her head in a golden wreath that rested on fluffy waves, was looking more than usually appealing, he thought, and he congratulated himself on the restraint with which he was allowing her mind to work on the proposition he had made to her. She was evidently becoming more normal, finding herself as it were. Those flashes of red and white that had passed across her face in her intensity of feeling had ceased. Her voice was steady and civil. "The meadow seems to agree with me," she answered. "Why should my not going with you prevent you from doing your errand at the village?" Why, indeed? thought Carder, regarding her. She had no money, she was in a part of the world strange to her. If she again strolled forth arrayed in the white costume in which her girlish vanity seemed to revel, how could she do anything unsafe during the short time of his absence, especially with Pete to guard her? The dwarf had had it made perfectly clear to him that his life depended on Geraldine's presence. However, it was Carder's policy never to take a very small chance of a very big misfortune. 'Safe bind, safe find,' was a favorite saying of his. "As soon as you feel thoroughly rested, we must take a trip to town," he said, and he advanced a bony, ill-kept hand toward hers as if he would seize it. "I think Ma works too hard," he added diplomatically as Geraldine slid her hand off the table. "We must go and see if we can get the right kind of help. You'll know how to pick it out. Then what do you say to havin' an architect come out and look over the old shack here and see what he thinks he can do with it, regardless of expense?" Geraldine felt that unnerving nausea again steal around her heart.