During the next few days, while he gathered his strength, our friend sat about the house in the sunny places and took a strong liking for the simple, kind old wife, and told her by degrees the story of his life and his friends. In that wonderful air he rallied like magic. He took longer and longer walks, keeping well out of sight of prying eyes, though the place was retired enough, for that. Thursday morning of that week he borrowed some clothes of the farmer and made a bundle of his own. He bade the old couple good-bye, not without regret on either side. As the Wanita ploughed up the lake that day on her return trip, a man came down from the hurricane-deck into the cabin, sat by the table and took up a magazine lying there and turned it over. He was dressed in coarse, ill-fitting, homespun clothes, and had a newly-healed scar on his forehead. His upper lip was roughly shorn, and the rest of his face covered with a two or three weeks' beard. He was not an attractive-looking person, certainly, and yet the pretty girl sewing by the window, her face quite wan and worn-looking now, glanced at him many times in a flurried, nervous way; and when he was gone she went and took up the old magazine, opened it where a leaf was turned down, and read these lines of an old-fashioned ballad: Oh, alone and alorn, as the night came down, Sir Reginald walked on the wet sea-sands; And all as he walked came Marianne, King's daughter of all those lands. That evening, as the dusk was coming on, Hester Charner walked on the path along the lake, round toward the forest, and suddenly in a shaded place she met the unkempt stranger of the boat She started back and almost screamed. His face had a dark look that scared her. "Is it you, Mr. Meadow?" she entreated. "No," he answered: "Meadow's dead--drowned in the lake for ever, I hope to God." The girl drew back with a little cry. "Then he did kill him?" she wailed. "Oh, I wish I might die! I wish he'd killed me!" "Oh, you false girl!" Field broke out. "But he did not kill him. I killed him myself. He would if I hadn't, and served him right, too. But he did not put a finger on him. I saved him from murder--him and me. Yes, _you_--don't shrink--you drove him to it; and you would have been the guiltier of the two. You were as good as promised to him--you know you were--and you should have been proud to be. He would have given his life for you any day, and you broke your faith for a smooth--faced, brazen fop, who played with you to your peril, and despised you in his heart all the while for a false jade. You may thank Trapp all your life for cutting that short when he did, and thank God you can yet be an honest wife to an honest man."