"I know a place--just a little way back yonder--that's _fat_ with nuts!" Sheila looked disappointed. It seemed, at this hour, rather a poor secret. But Ted, still with the air of honoring her above all others of her sex, went on: "I'm going back and get some. And"--this impressively--"I'm going to let you come with me!" Sheila brightened at the magnanimous offer, but a moment later grew uneasy: "Grandmother would be scared if I didn't come home with the others." "How'd she find it out? Your house is farthest. She won't see the rest of 'em." "But--but when I tell her--" said Sheila uneasily. "You _needn't_ tell her! Don't you understand? She'll never know you _didn't_ come home with the others!" Ted had a scrupulous personal honor, a pride, as it were, in his integrity. He told the truth about his own transgressions and paid the piper without complaint. But for others his truth was sometimes equivocal, his morality comfortably lax. And these lapses from grace on his part always filled Sheila with a shocked dismay. "Oh," she protested, "I couldn't do that! Why, it would be _lying_!" "Fiddlesticks! Where's the lie? You wouldn't _tell_ one!" "It _would_ be a lie," persisted Sheila. "It would be a lie if I let her think what wasn't so." "Fiddlesticks!" he pronounced again. But he looked at her approvingly, nevertheless. Sheila was always "square," and he liked her the better for it. "Well, you go along with Charlotte, then," he added regretfully. But he had tempted her more successfully than he knew, and her mind was busily working toward some compromise with her conscience. She cast an eye in the direction Charlotte had taken, and that glance decided her. "Charlotte's out of sight," she said. "I--I believe I'll stay, Ted--_but I'll tell when I get home_!" It was late afternoon when they did at last start homeward--with baskets as full as Ted had predicted. Going through the bright-hued woods, where the scarlet and burnished yellow of long-lived leaves still flaunted ribbons of flame and the dead and dun-colored broke crisply beneath their feet, they fell amicably silent, trudging briskly along with the impetus of health and hunger. Ted's silence was the content of a body drenched all day in sunshine and clean, cold air, and now deliciously placid; but Sheila's quiet was of a different quality. For her the woods were full of mysteries and miracles; she was sure that little people, as quick and elusive as shadows, darted hither and thither at her very feet, and that enchantment was spread there like a fine-spun web. As she walked onward, brooding over things unseen and yet so surely true for her, there recurred to her a dream of the night before, and so vivid was her remembrance of it that she seemed to be dreaming a second time.