“Now that we are out of that hornet’s nest I rather wish he would. I must meet him face to face and have this out!” “No, Don Compie, please! please! he might get me again,” she pleaded. “I would much rather die.” She clung to my arm tightly as we made our way to the farm house. I knocked, the door was opened by a kindly faced, stooped-shouldered old man in his shirt sleeves. I told him my daughter and I had met with an accident about five miles back in the country, and were walking to the nearest garage--would he accommodate us with a little breakfast. He looked at me long and searchingly--I say long, perhaps it was only a second; then as if satisfied with the examination, he said yes, if we didn’t mind cooking the bacon, he could give us some bread, milk and apple-butter. But his wife had died two months ago, and his boys had already gone to the field to plough and were waiting for him; so there was no one to wait on us. “But just make yourselves at home,” he added, as he shuffled about in thick soled boots, pouring what was left from a can of milk into an earthen pitcher, and placing a large loaf of bread before us. “Them automobiles,” and he shook his head disgustedly, “when they make up their minds to stop, thir’s just no way setten thim up again, is thir? No, sir, gimme a pair of mules any day, they’re stidier.” “My engine went wrong this time, and I simply can’t get the thing started. I’ll have to be towed in, I’m afraid.” “Just shut the door when you get done, and if you want water you can fetch it from the pump yonder.” I took pains to thank him and pay him for his hospitality, and promised to close up carefully. Ellen, minus a hat, sat with her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands, while the old man moved about putting things a bit in order, as he called it, before he left. “Since the missus died, I have to look after everything inside and outside.” This he said as he brushed the crumbs from the preceding breakfast on to the floor, and then swept crumbs, dirt and all out of the door. After he disappeared down the hill, behind the pump, Ellen raised her eyes appealingly to mine. “What am I to do, Don Compie?” This was the name she had given me when she was a baby and could not say John Constable. Her mother, too, had called me by it in later years, to distinguish me from her husband. As I have said, it was seven years since I left for Europe in one last effort to forget her, whom fortune decreed I could not possess. When I left little Ellen was just a child, almost a baby. But now she was blooming into womanhood. “Ellen, dear,” I asked sympathetically, “do you feel strong enough to tell me of the death of mother and daddy? Were you in the motor with them at the time of the accident, or just how did it happen?”