them, and slipped out of sight among the trees on the slope below. Ormond
stopped the horse, and turned to his wife with a strange kind of whisper.
'Did you see it?' he asked, and she answered yes, and bade him drive on.
He did so, slowly looking back round the side of the buggy till a turn of
the road hid the place where the tramp had crossed their track. She could
not speak, she says, till they came in sight of their house. Then her
heart gave a great bound, and she broke out on him, blaming him for
having encouraged the tramp to lurk about, as he must have done, all day,
by his foolish sentimentality in taking his breakfast out to him. 'He saw
that you were a delicate person, and now to-night he will be coming
round, and--' She says Ormond kept looking at her, while she talked, as
if he did not know what she was saying, and all at once she glanced down
at their feet, and discovered that her hat was gone.

"That, she owned, made her frantic, and she blazed out at him again, and
accused him of having lost her hat by stopping to look at that worthless
fellow, and then starting up the horse so suddenly that it had rolled
out. He usually gave her as good as she sent when she let herself go in
that way, and she told me she would have been glad if he had done it now,
but he only looked at her in a kind of daze, and when he understood, at
last, he bade her get out and go into the house--they were almost at the
door,--and he would go back and find her hat himself. 'Indeed, you'll do
nothing of the kind,' she said she told him. 'I shall go back with you,
or you'll be hunting up that precious vagabond and bringing him home to
supper.' Ormond said, 'All right,' with a kind of dreamy passivity, and
he turned the old horse again, and they drove slowly back, looking for
the hat in the road, right and left. She had not noticed before that it
was getting late, and perhaps it was not so late as it seemed when they
got into that lonely piece of woods again, and the veils of shadow began
to drop round them, as if they were something falling from the trees, she