Old lady Gordon sat quite still in her chair, gazing after him with darkly drawn brows, with her turkey-wing fan lying forgotten on her lap, and her novel cast, neglected, on a chair by her side. She had not told Lynn of the accident to the manager of the farm; she had not spoken of her intended visit to the Frenchman on that morning; she had not asked her grandson to go with her, although she walked with difficulty and even with pain, and longed with age's helplessness to have him near by to lean upon. When Lynn was quite out of sight she arose--a fine, majestic old figure in her loose white drapery--and started across the fields, making her slow, painful way to the Beauchamp cottage. She found the Frenchman in bed, and, seeing how seriously he was hurt, and remembering the farm work which must go undirected, she was not in a better humor when she turned her face homeward. Still she held her wrath with an iron hand, exercising perhaps the greatest self-control that she had ever brought to bear upon anything during her whole life. She even forced herself to make some gruffly civil response when Lynn came back to dinner at noon, and hastened away again as soon as he could, with a few hurried, happy words and another gay smile and careless wave of his hand. But all through the afternoon hours of that long, dull, solitary day old lady Gordon's anger grew as thunder clouds gather, and when, after supper, Lynn again took up his hat and turned, intending again to leave her, the brewing tempest suddenly burst upon him. "Have you ever stopped to think where all this philandering must lead? It's high time," she broke out, hoarse with passionate rage. The young man, holding his hat in his hand, wheeled and looked at his grandmother in utter amazement, startled, almost alarmed, by the violence of her tone and by the suddenness of the attack. "I don't understand. I don't know in the least what you mean," he said honestly enough, and yet, even as he spoke, a glimmering consciousness came into his open face. "Oh, yes, you do. You know perfectly well, but I'll put it plainer if you want me to," she went on, roughly, sneeringly. Lynn reddened, putting up his hand with a gesture imposing silence. "Perhaps I do understand something of what you mean," he said hesitatingly, with the hesitation which every right-minded man feels at referring--however distantly--in any such connection to a girl whom he reveres. "And if I do understand anything of what you mean, you must allow me to tell you that there has been no philandering, nor any semblance of it."