Bessie's little troop were now ready to march, and they set off at a run, heedless of her cry to stop a while behind the riders, "Else we shall be in the dust of their heels," she said. Lingering would not have saved her, however; for the strangers were evidently purposed to wait until she came up. Jack was now taking his turn on Jerry, and Jerry with his head towards his stable wanted no leading or encouraging to go. He was soon up with the gentlemen and in advance of them. Next Tom and Willie trotted by and stood, hand-in-hand, gazing at the horses. Bessie's feet lagged as if leaden weights were tied to them, and her conscious air as she glanced in the face of the stranger who had addressed her before set at rest any remaining doubt of who she was. "Are you Elizabeth Fairfax who lives with Mrs. Carnegie?" he asked in an abrupt voice--the more abrupt and loud for a certain nervousness and agitation that arose in him at the sight of the child. "Yes, sir, I am," replied Bessie, like a veritable echo of himself. "Then, as we are travelling the same road, you will be our guide, eh?" "The children are little; they cannot keep pace with men on horseback," said Bessie. They were a mile and a half from Beechhurst yet. Mr. John Short spoke hastily in an endeavor to promote an understanding, and blundered worse than his client: his suggestion was that they might each take up one of the bairns; but the expression of Bessie's eyes was a reminder that she might not please to trudge at their bridle, though the little and weak ones were to be carried. "You are considering who is to take you up?" hazarded Mr. Fairfax. Bessie recovered her countenance and said, as she would have said to any other strangers on horseback who might have invited her to be their guide on foot, "You cannot miss the way. It lies straight before you for nearly a mile over the heath; then you will come to cross-roads and a guide-post. You will be at Beechhurst long before we shall." The gentlemen accepted their dismissal and rode on. Was Bessie mollified at all by the mechanical courtesy with which their hats were lifted at their departure? They recognized, then, that she was not the little gypsy they had hailed her. It did not enter into her imagination that they had recognized also the true Fairfax face under her dishevelled holiday locks, though she was persuaded that the one who had asked her name was her wicked grandfather: that her grandfather was a wicked man Bessie had quite made up her mind. Mr. John Short admired her behavior. It did not chafe his dignity or alarm him for the peace of his future life. But Mr. Fairfax was not a man of humor; he saw no fun whatever in his prospects with that intrepid child, who had evidently inherited not the Fairfax face only, but the warm Fairfax temper. "Do you suppose that she guessed who we are?" he asked his man of law.