"I should be very glad, indeed, to hear what you have to say," he announced, and his voice was like a nicked knife blade. Flush by flush by flush the red glory fled from Adele Reitzen's face. Her throat began to flutter. Her knees crumpled under her. Fear went over her like a gray fog. With one despairing hand she reached back to the Woodland Girl. "Oh, tell them it was you," she whispered hotly. "Oh, tell them it was you." Her scared face brightened viciously. "It _was_ you--you know! Tell them--oh, tell them anything--only save me!" The Woodland Girl's eyes were big with horror. She started to speak, she started to protest, but before the jumbled words could leave her lips Adele Reitzen turned to the others and blurted out hysterically: "Surely I can't be expected to keep even a love-secret under these--distressing circumstances. _It was Chloe who went out to the street corner to-night--like a common shop-girl--to meet Brian Baird. She wore my cloak on purpose to disguise her._" Like the blaring scream of a discordant trumpet, the treacherous, flatted truth crashed into the Woodland Girl's startled senses, and the man in the shape of a sagging willow cross started up and cried out, "My God!" For a second the Woodland Girl stood staring into his dreadful, chaotic face, then she squared her shoulders and turned to meet the wrathful, contemptuous surprise in her uncle's and aunt's features. "So it was you," sneered the uncle, "embroiling our decent household in a common, vulgar intrigue?" "So it was you," flamed her aunt, "you who have been posing all these days as an Innocent?" Frantic with perplexity, muddled with fear, torn by conflicting chivalries, the Woodland Girl stared back and forth from Adele Reitzen's agonized plea to the grim, inscrutable gleam in Brian Baird's eyes. As though every living, moving verb had been ripped out of that night's story, and all the inflexible nouns were printing themselves slam-bang one on top of another--Roses, Wine, Music, Silver, Diamonds, Fir-Balsam telescoped each other in her senses. "Your father sent you down here," persisted her aunt brutally, "on the private plea to me that he was planning to be married again--but I can readily see that perhaps no one would exactly want you." The Woodland Girl's heart began to pound. "We--are--waiting," prodded her uncle's icy voice. Suddenly the Girl's memory quickened. Once, long ago, her father had said to her: "Little Daughter, if you are ever in fear and danger by sea or land--or city, which is neither sea nor land--turn always to that man, and to that man only, whom you would trust in the deep woods. Put your imagination to work, not your reason. You have no reason!"