Suddenly she sat up, her small round face puckered into such lines of pain that the student turned his head away, feeling dangerously near tears. He had always been taught, by his father and by his mother who feared contagion, that of all people in the world, the squatters must be most avoided; they had no hearts; they killed men and broke the laws simply for their own gain. But here was a girl magnetically drawing him toward her. Dirty? Yes, and barefooted, wild-eyed and untaught, but suffering--and such suffering! Frederick Graves, like his father, would teach the Gospel of Christ, of peace and good-will to all mankind,--but the deep burnishing of the beautiful hair as it swept the floor in red curls had much to do with Frederick's sympathy, for man-like, he looked upon Eve in her beauty and pitied. "Your father is Orn Skinner, who shot the gamekeeper to-night?" he asked presently. Tess nodded, still looking fearfully into his face. "He was disobeying the law," replied Frederick gravely. Again she nodded, for Tess had no spirit to thwart an argument at that moment. "People who disobey the law," went on the student in his youthful righteousness, "take their life in their hands, and other people's too. Don't you think that the woman left without her husband, the gamekeeper's wife, is weeping for him?" It was a new thought for Tess, but she would not harbor it. It didn't seem quite just to Daddy. She drew down the red lips at the corners, and helplessly clung closer and closer to the toad. "What are you going to do?" asked the student. "You lived here with your father, but you can't stay here alone." "It air my home," she said distrustfully, "and I stays here and hangs to this here shanty till Daddy comes back. Aw, he air comin' back, ain't he? He won't go to that place--?" She closed her lips, fearing to utter the thought. Frederick shook his head. "Poor child," he said, with a fatherly air. "It is a dangerous position." If the case had been placed before Frederick Graves to decide, yesterday he would have hanged Orn Skinner for the murder of the gamekeeper. But to-night--well, to-night his ideas of men and ... of women, too, had changed. "But he didn't mean it," went on Tess, casting back the unruly hair which shrouded her face in its new state of cleanliness. "He wouldn't have hurt a fly, Daddy Skinner wouldn't." A whistle from the outside, heard plainly through the beating of the wind, caused Frederick to fling open the door. "Yes, father," he said loudly, "I'm here. I missed you on the way. Come in a moment if you will." Tessibel gathered herself more closely into a small human ball than ever. She had feared the minister since the time she had talked off his warts with the wizard words she had learned from a hag living on the ragged rocks. "What's this," demanded the Dominie, looking sternly at her, and she dropped her eyes in confusion.