"You fried that liver!" the gentleman burst forth abruptly, "you know you fried it, Luella! I might as well have eaten a shingle off the cottage--it's killing me! Ugh! As if I hadn't enough to bear without being murdered with fried liver!" "I do' know what you've got to bear, Mr. Wortley," and Luella gathered her apron full of kindlings, "but you needn't add fried liver to it, 'cause it was broiled." "Never!" exploded the fiery gentleman. "I'd ought to know," said Luella firmly, "I had the grid-iron to wash." "As for children," he veered off again, "you couldn't have poorer company. Think what they'll grow into--think!" "Some don't turn out so bad," she reminded him, starting toward the house. "Ah, but when are you going to decide that they _have_ 'turned out'?" he demanded, trotting angrily beside her, "tell me that, will you? Perhaps you imagine that when they're of age, legally men and women, and you've managed to keep 'em out of the State Reform School up to then, you're justified in thinking they've 'turned out'? Hey?" "Oh, now, I wouldn't go on so about the State Reform School, Mr. Wortley," Luella urged pacifically, "that's awful. I always say the young ones mean well, mostly; there ain't many that set out to be bad a-purpose. Only, accordin' to their judgment--" "Their judgment! _Their_ judgment! For God's sake!" he thundered, and darted into the house, slamming the door so that the casements rattled. "I guess you'd better run on, dear," Luella suggested, "he's bad to-day. Some days I just have my hands full with him, and then again he'll be real pleasant and amusin'--he'll say the cutest things. But he's perturbed to-day, and that's a fact. You stop in 'long in the afternoon, when he takes his nap and I'm at my ironing, and we'll have a good visit." Caroline nodded soberly and took up her journey again, not a little depressed; he had been such a whirlwind of a gentleman. Unconsciously she followed a tiny, all-but-overgrown trail that led straight up the hill against which the cottage was built and lost itself, apparently, in the thick wood at the top. A belt of tall beeches half way up blotted out everything behind it, and the dozens of chipmunks and red squirrels that scurried hither and yon, the fat hen-partridge schooling her brood under Caroline's very nose, the flame-colored, translucent lizards slipping under mossy roots at her feet, showed the neglect into which the trail had fallen. She pushed on, hardly certain now that she had not lost it, or that it had ever led anywhere, when she stumbled suddenly over a handsome meerschaum pipe, still warm, and colored to a nicety. She picked it up, poked experimentally at the ashes with a twig, smelled it distastefully and stared about her. No one was in sight, and she had walked at least a quarter of a mile before she encountered a young man sitting in a dejected attitude on the stump of a yellow birch.