"Am I a burden?" Donelle turned weary, patient eyes on Jo. And Jo could not lie. That white, girlish face wrung her heart. "This is temperament run mad!" exclaimed Alice Lindsay. "I have a great mind to take you by force, Donelle. I will if Mam’selle gives the word." "You won’t though, will you, Mamsey?" Jo could not speak. Then Donelle turned kind, pleading eyes to Mrs. Lindsay. "You see, I couldn’t play if I were dragged. When I’m dragged I can never do anything. I wish I could tell you how sorry I am and how much I love you; but I am so tired. When I got to thinking of Mamsey here alone, and the Walled House closed, why——" Alice Lindsay turned from the sad eyes, the quivering mouth. "Listen, dear!" she said in her old, gentle tones; "I’ve lived enough with natures like yours to understand them. Stay with Mam’selle this winter, Donelle, and think your way out. You have a clear mind, you will see that what we all want to do for you is right. In the spring I will return, we’ll have another summer in the Walled House. A year from now all will be safe and right. The trip abroad can wait, everything shall wait, for you. Now will you be good, Donelle?" She turned smilingly to the girl, and Donelle gratefully stretched out her hands. "Oh! how I thank you," she said, "and I do love and trust you. I will try to be good. Oh! if you only really knew!" "Knew what, Donelle?" "Why, how I could not live away off there, even with you, if I remembered Mamsey sitting here making the best of the bits that are left." Then Donelle broke down and wept violently. Still she was not ill. She was worn to the edge of endurance, but after a day and night of rest in the room beside Jo she got up, quite herself again. "And we’ll say no more about it until spring," vowed Jo, but a wonderful light had crept into her eyes. "I’m a selfish, unworthy lot——" But the light stayed in her eyes. Then one day Donelle took her fiddle and strolled out alone to test the virtue of her safe, happy feeling. She went down to the river and sat upon the bare, black rocks. The tide was low and the day was more like spring than early autumn. "And now," whispered Donelle, "I’ll play and think. I have to act too much when Mamsey is watching." Donelle knew she had to untangle many loose ends, now that she had snapped her thread. She did not want, above anything on earth, that Jo should know her deep, real reason for returning. But how could she make sure with that horrible man, Pierre, loose in Point of Pines? It did not matter how lonely she and Jo might be, if only they could have each other without their common secret rising between them.