'Do you think I'd let you go alone ?' 'Go alone ?' Jerrie repeated, stopping short and fixing her blue eyes upon him.

'You have let me go alone a hundred times, and after dark, too, when I was much smaller than I am now, and less able to defend myself, supposing there was anything to fear, which there is not.

Pray go back, and not trouble yourself for me.' 'I shall not go back,' Tom said.

'I waited on purpose to come with you.
There is something I must say to you, and I may as well say it now as any other time.' Jerrie was tall, but Tom was six inches taller, and he was looking down straight into her eyes with an expression in his before which hers fell, for she guessed what it was he wished to say to her, and her heart beat painfully as, without another word, she walked rapidly on until they were in the woods near a place where four tall pines formed a kind of oblong square.

Here an iron seat had been placed years before, when the Tracy children were young, and held what they called their picnics there under the thick boughs of the pines which shaded them from both heat and cold.