horror of seclusion with her own fancies. Besides, they were camping
OUT of the house, and if she chose to sit up or walk about, no one could
think it strange. She wished her father were here that she might have
some one of her own kin to talk to, yet she knew not what to say to him
if he had come. She wanted somebody to sympathize with her feelings,--or
rather, perhaps, some one to combat and even ridicule the uneasiness
that had lately come over her. She knew what her father would say,--"Do
you want to go, or do you want to stay here? Do you like these people,
or do you not?" She remembered the one or two glowing and enthusiastic
accounts she had written him of her visit here, and felt herself
blushing again. What would he think of Mrs. Randolph's opening and
answering the telegram? Wouldn't he find out from the major if she had
garbled the sense of his dispatch?

Away to the right, in the midst of the distant and invisible
wheat-field, there was the same intermittent star, which like a living,
breathing thing seemed to dilate in glowing respiration, as she had seen
it the first night of her visit. Mr. Bent's forge! It must be nearly
daylight now; the poor fellow had been up all night, or else was
stealing this early march on the day. She recalled Adele's sudden
eulogium of him. The first natural smile that had come to her lips since
the earthquake broke up her nervous restraint, and sent her back more
like her old self to her couch.

But she had not proceeded far towards the tent, when she heard the sound
of low voices approaching her. It was the major and his wife, who, like
herself, had evidently been unable to sleep, and were up betimes. A new
instinct of secretiveness, which she felt was partly the effect of her
artificial surrounding, checked her first natural instinct to call to
them, and she drew back deeper in the shadow to let them pass. But to