She wore no hat, and her head drooped with an air of patient sadness. Her hands clasped behind her, she walked aimlessly over the falling leaves and seemed absently to listen to their rustling crispness as her footsteps passed through them. There was a black bow in the ruffled bodice, and with her black hair she made on the gold and gray a colorless silhouette. Odd jumped over the wall, and, as he approached her, the rustling leaves under his feet, their falling patter from the trees, seemed to fill the air with loud whisperings. Hilda turned at this echo of her own footfalls, and Odd could almost have smiled at the weary unexpectancy of her look transformed to a wide gaze of recognition. But his heart was in a flame of indignant tenderness, for, all chivalrous comprehension conceded, Katherine's confession had been cruelly tardy and Hilda's face was pitiful. She stood silent and motionless looking at him, and Odd, as he joined her, said the first words that came to his lips. "My child! How ill you look!" The self-forgetful devotion of his voice, his eyes, sent a quiver across her face, but Odd, seeing only its frozen pain, remembered those stabbing words: "You are cruel and weak and mean," which she had spoken with just such a look, and any lingering thought of a fine onslaught was nipped in the bud. "I may speak to you?" he asked. Hilda, for her own part, found it almost impossible to speak; she wanted to throw herself on his breast and weep away all the gnawing loneliness, all the cruel doubts and bitter sense of guilt. The sight of him gave her such joy that everything was already half forgotten--even Katherine; even Katherine--she realized it and steeled herself to say with cold faintness-- "Oh, yes;" adding, "you startled me." "So thin, so pale, such woful eyes!" He stood staring at her. "You--don't look well either," she said, still in the soft cold voice. "I should be very sorry to look well." Peter was adapting himself to reality; but if the impetuous dream was abandoned, the courage of humbler methods was growing, and he could smile a little at her. "Hilda, I have a great deal to tell you. Will you walk with me for a little while? It is a lovely day for walking. How beautiful the woods are looking." "Beautiful. I walk here a great deal." She looked away from him and into the golden distance. "And you will walk here now with me?" he asked, adding, as the pale hesitation of her face again turned to him, "Don't be frightened, dear, I am not going to force any solution upon you; I am not going to try to make you think well of me in spite of your conscience." Think well of him! As if, good or bad, he was not everything to her, and the rest of the world nowhere! Hilda now looked down at the leaves.