“And from the moment we knew it was you--that you were here--we felt perfectly safe. It doesn’t seem now that we were very much afraid, even before that, although probably we were. There was a lot of hooting, and that dreadful blowing on horns, and all that, and once somebody rang the door-bell; but, beyond throwing snowballs, nothing else was done. So I daresay they only wanted to scare us. Of course it was the fire that made us really nervous. We got that brave girl’s warning about the mob’s coming here just a little while before the sky began to redden with the blaze; and that sight, coming on the heels of her letter--” “What girl? What letter?” asked Reuben. “Here it is,” answered Kate, drawing a crumpled sheet of paper from her bosom, and reading aloud: “Dear Miss Minster: “I have just heard that a crowd of men are coming to your house to-night to do violent things. I am starting out to try and bring you help. Meanwhile, I send you my father, who will do whatever you tell him to do. “Gratefully yours, “Jessica Lawton.” Reuben had risen abruptly to his feet before the signature was reached. “I am ashamed of myself,” he said; “I’ve left her out there all this while. And she was ill, too! There was so much else that really she escaped my memory altogether.” He had made his way out into the hall and taken up his hat and coat. “You will come back, won’t you?” Kate asked. “There are so many things to talk over, with all of us. And--and bring her too, if--if she will come.” With a sign of acquiescence and comprehension. Reuben darted down the steps and into the darkness. In a very few minutes he returned, disappointment written all over his face. “She’s gone. Gedney, the man I left with the sleigh, says she went off as soon as I had got out of sight. I had offered to have him drive her home, but she refused. She’s a curiously independent girl.” “I am very sorry,” said Kate. “But I will go over the first thing in the morning and thank her.” “You don’t as yet know the half of what you have to thank her for,” put in the lawyer. “I don’t mean that it was so great a thing--my coming--but she drove all the way out to my mother’s farm to bring me here to-night, and fainted when she got there. She was really ill. If her father is still here, I think he’d better go at once to her place, and see about her.” The suggestion seemed a good one, and was instantly acted upon. Ben Lawton had been in the kitchen, immensely proud of his position as the responsible garrison of a beleaguered house, and came out into the hallway now with a full stomach and a satisfied expression on his lank face. He assented with readiness to Reuben’s idea, when it was explained to him.