Well, perhaps it was an intrusion.  It was certainly their house if it did hold my darling.  I looked at her steadily:  “Are you sure that Bessie Stewart has gone away from here?”

“To Watervliet—­yea,” she answered composedly.  “She left here last week.”

My skill at cross-examination was at fault.  If that woman was lying, she would be a premium witness.  “I should be sorry, madam,” I said, recalling the world’s etiquette, which I had half forgotten, “to intrude upon you at this or any other time, but I cannot leave here in doubt.  Will you oblige me by stating the exact hour and day at which Miss Stewart is expected to return from Watervliet, and the road thither?”

She glanced across the room.  Answering the look, the man spoke, for the first time since she had entered:  “The party, I believe, will be home to-night.”

“And she with them?”

“Yea, unless she has elected to remain.”

“At what hour?”

“I cannot tell.”

“By what road shall I meet her?”

“There are two roads:  we generally use the river-road.”

“To-night?  I will go to meet her.  By the river-road, you say?”

“Yea.”

“And if I do not meet her?”

“If thou dost not meet her,” said the lady-abbess, answering calmly, “it will be because she is detained on the road.”

I had to believe her, and yet I was very skeptical.  As I walked out of the door the man was at my heels.  He followed me out on to the wooden stoop and nodded to Hiram.

“Who is that, Hiram?” I whispered as he leaned across the back of a horse, adjusting some leathern buckle.

“That?” said Hiram under his breath.  “That’s a deep ’un:  that’s Elder Nebson.”

Great was the dissatisfaction of the stout-hearted Splinter at my retreat, as he called it, from the enemy’s ground.

“I’d ha’ liked nothin’ better than to beat up them quarters.  I thought every minit’ you’d be calling me, and was ready to go in.”  And he clenched his fist in a way that showed unmistakably how he would have “gone in” had he been summoned.  By this time we were driving on briskly toward the river-road.  “You wa’n’t smart, I reckon, to leave that there house.  It was your one chance, hevin’ got in.  Ten chances to one she’s hid away som’eres in one of them upper rooms,” and he pointed to a row of dormer-windows, “not knowin’ nothin’ of your bein’ there.”

“Stop!” I said with one foot on the shafts.  “You don’t mean to say she is shut up there?”

“Shet up?  No:  they be too smart for that.  But there’s plenty ways to shet a young gal’s eyes an’ ears ‘thout lockin’ of her up.  How’d she know who was in this wagon, even if she seed it from her winders?  To be sure, I made myself conspicuous enough, a-whistlin’ ‘Tramp, tramp,’ and makin’ the horses switch round a good deal.  But, like enough, ef she’d be down-spereted-like, she’d never go near the winder, but just set there, a-stitchin’ beads on velvet or a-plattin’ them mats.”