“Ah,” he said; “and the girl--did she hear?” “She couldn’t help it, dad. But she can’t have noticed much, for she never even referred to it afterward.” “Which looks bad, and so much for your profound knowledge of the sex.” He looked at me keenly for some moments from under his matted eyebrows; then muttered as if to himself: “Here’s a growing lad, and loyal, I believe. What if I took him a yard into my confidence?” “Oh, yes, dad,” I said, eagerly. “You can trust me, indeed you can. I only want to be of some use.” He slightly shook his head, then seemed to wake up all of a sudden. “There,” he said; “be off, like a good boy, and don’t worry me a second time. You meant well, and I’m not offended.” “Yes, dad,” I said a little sadly, and was turning to go, when he spoke to me again: “And if the girl should mention this matter--you know what--to you, say what I tell you now--that Dr. Crackenthorpe thinks your father can tell him where more coins are to be found like the one I gave him that night; but that your father can’t and is under no obligation to Dr. Crackenthorpe--none whatever.” So I left him, puzzled, a little depressed, but proud to be the recipient of even this crumb of confidence on the part of so reserved and terrible a man. Still I could not but feel that there was something inconsistent in his words to me and those I had heard him address to the doctor. Without a doubt his utterances on the road had pointed to a certain recognition of the necessity of bribing the other to silence. CHAPTER VI. THE NIGHT BEFORE. Full of dissatisfaction I wandered into the shed and loitered aimlessly about. As I stood there Jason came clattering homeward, his coat collar turned up and his curly head bowed to the deluge. “So you got home before me?” he said, shaking himself and squeezing his cap out as he spoke. “Yes; we came straight.” “It was lovely in the meads, wasn’t it?” said he, with an odd glance at me. “It’s been lovely all this May,” said I. “And that means a fat churchyard. Old Rottengoose says: ‘A cold May and windy makes a full barn and findy.’ A queer one, old Peg is. She’d die if she cast a woolen before the first of June. I wonder what she’d think of sitting under a hedge in a northeaster?” I started a little and shot a look askance at my brother. Could he have seen us? But his next words reassured me. “Or of falling asleep in the shade, as I did, till the rain on my face woke me up.” “Then you didn’t see us pass----” I began and stopped. “See what? I saw nothing but my eyelids and the sky through ’em.” I gave a sigh of relief. My feelings toward Zyp were boyish and bashful and innocent enough, heaven knows; but in the shadow of my rough past they were beginning to glimmer out so strange and sweet that the merest suspicion of their incurring publicity filled me with a shame-faced terror of ridicule that was agony.