Dora heaved a little sigh of regret as she folded up the letter. "Poor fellow! he is still very angry with me," she thought to herself. Garth took a long, solitary walk when he had finished his epistle; it had taken him more than an hour to compose, and yet it had hardly filled one sheet of note-paper. He was heavy with discomfort, and yet a feeling of triumph was uppermost. "She will see that I am not to be played with; that I regard myself as free, and mean to keep my freedom," he said to himself, as he tramped through the country roads in the starlight. It was the beginning of November, and there was a keen, frosty feeling in the air. The fields that bordered the road on either side looked black in the dim light; the trees looked gaunt and grotesque, stretching out their unclothed limbs in the darkness; the grey stone wails seemed dim and unsubstantial. Garth walked on with long, even strides. The cold air, the exercise, stirred his young blood, and drove away despondent fancies; in their place came pleasurable images, faint, yet full of grace, making pulsation stronger within him. When did the thought first occur to him? When and where? or was it a thought at all, or only a feeling or sentiment? A novel sensation not to be described, and certainly not to be analyzed, had taken possession of him the very night after his interview with Dora, when, sore and angry, he had betaken himself to the cottage. It was strange how that picture of the two sisters haunted him. Sometimes, when he woke up in the middle of the night, he recalled it vividly: the child curled up on the rocking-chair, the girl kneeling on the rug with the plate of cakes in her hand, the firelight shining on her round, dimpled arms and flushed face, and then her paleness, and the startled brightness of her eyes when she turned to him. Had Dora ever grown pale at the sight of him? had she ever moved his better nature by such sweet, strong words as those that greeted his ear that night? "What is it that men do not understand?" he had asked her in his simple, straight-forward way. "The blessedness of giving," she had answered him, without guile or hesitation, "the privilege of being able to see and love what is highest and best without hope or thought of return. Some women feel like that." Good heavens! could she--was it a bare possibility that she could be speaking of herself? and though, a moment after, he repelled this thought with a blush of shame over the vanity of such a supposition, other words conspired to haunt him. "Those that have sympathy here must have sympathy there," she had gravely assured him, and her earnestness had moved him to excitement. What if this sympathy were between them two; between him, Garth Clayton, and the young creature that he had befriended?