She did not cry out, but she stopped quickly and looked at him in amazement. He had declined going there to speak for her father, and yet here he was waiting for her, and for an instant she felt something like gratitude that he should thus think of her. But his answer to her question, “How did you know I was coming here?” dispelled that illusion. “I didn’t know,” he said. “I came, hoping to find out what they meant to do. I never dreamed of your venturing out in this storm, and was astonished when I saw you come up the stairs.” “Where were you?” Louie asked next, and he answered her truthfully: “In that recess. Confound it, I am a coward and a sneak, that’s a fact, and I didn’t care to have you or anyone see me.” “So you kept in the dark, and let me go in alone,” Louie replied, in a tone Herbert did not like. He could not see her face, as they were going down the stairs, but he could feel that something had come between them, and was very uncomfortable. The wind had gone down, but the rain still fell heavily, and he drew her cloak around her and her arm closely in his, and held her umbrella over her, and tried to talk naturally, asking what the men had said, and if they were civil to her. “If they hadn’t been, I’d—” he began, then stopped suddenly as he thought of himself on the dry-goods box in the recess, wondering how he was to know whether they were civil or not. He made light of the idea that they ever thought seriously of molesting her father. Godfrey Sheldon might, for he was a revengeful dog; but no one would follow him, and if they had, his father would have spoken to them. In fact, he had been asked to attend the meeting, and had declined. He was drawing a good deal upon his imagination as to what his father would do, for he knew very well what he would not do. But he wanted to reassure Louie and talked on in the same strain, but Louie did not answer, and with every word he said it seemed to her he was cutting the tie which bound them. She had pledged herself to her father’s creditors, and meant to keep the pledge, although she knew it would in all human probability separate Herbert from her. “And why not do it at once?” she kept asking herself, and by the time she reached home her resolution was taken. There was a moment of blindness, when she did not even see the light from the hall, as she went up the steps—a long breath, which was something like a sob, and then she said: “Come in a moment; I want to speak to you.” CHAPTER XVI SEVERING THE TIE Herbert went in, with a presentiment that something was going to happen deleterious to himself.