"Stop!" Not since leaving Ridgeville had John's tone been so sharp and commanding. "Don't mention that man's name ever again, Sis. And another thing! Let's agree between us never to speak of any of it again--not to each other or to anybody else. Do you understand? I want all of it buried forever in a grave as deep as from here to the middle of the earth." "Not your ma, nor Aunt Jane--?" "No, no!" he said, fiercely. "Nor Tilly?" "No, never--under any circumstances. If people want to know about us, send them to me--or simply say we are orphans, father and mother both dead. John and Dora Trott. You understand now, don't you?" The little tousled head moved wearily on the big pillow. She did not understand his far-seeing policy, but it didn't matter. He knew best. There was a rap on the door. Opening it, he admitted a waiter with a tray containing some steaming milk-toast. "I forgot ordering it," John said to Dora, as the man moved a small table up to her bedside and rested the tray on it. "You must not go to bed on an empty stomach, and this is just light enough to make you sleep soundly." The sight of the food, which was attractively served, appealed to the child, and when the man had left the room, John propped her up with the pillow and put the tray into her lap. She ate heartily, and when she had finished he set the tray aside. "Now go to sleep," he enjoined her. "We leave at eight thirty in the morning and scoot straight through Virginia to New York." CHAPTER XXXIV One morning, two days after this, Tilly, half ill from worry, was in her room. She heard the sound of wheels below, and, looking from her window, she descried Joel Eperson in his buggy under the spreading branches of a big beech in front of the gate. Her mother and father were at a lawyer's office in the village, where they had gone to conclude the arrangements for the immediate annulment of her marriage. She hastened down the stairs, and went out to the grim, sentinel-like visitor, noting, as she approached him, the tense, wasted expression of his sallow face and the dark splotches about his honest eyes. "Oh, Joel," she all but sobbed, "I'm so glad you came! Did Martha Jane tell you I wanted to see you?" "Yes, and I hurried over at once." He had bared his brow, held his broad-brimmed hat in his hand, and had descended to the ground. He took her hand and pressed it reverently and with a sort of shrinking timidity. "I want you to know, Tilly, that if there is anything on earth that I can do I'll willingly do it, if it costs my life. God only knows how I long to help you." "Oh, Joel, it is awful--awful!" she began, and stopped abruptly.