Not only that general a tale was in her thoughts, more alive than usual to the adventure, but something about Christina Holt, now Chapman, herself. How different a person I would be if my father had not come here as a boarder nearly a hundred years ago—if there had been only Boston and no Willard in my life! Who was going to speak of these interchanges? Of what Holts and Chapmans and Bakers and Jameses had brought to this little corner of New England, and what they had been given in exchange? It was not a simple story, and, alas, Jem Grindell was a simple man, a teller of tales, a believer in all the clichés of New England history, a professor of chemistry long retired, grown immensely fat and preposterously absorbed in genealogies. For years Christina had fled at his approach. But now she was cornered.

“There are going to be an awful lot of long-winded meetings, I’m afraid.” That is what came out of her meditations, aloud.

They had reached a kind of cliff. There seemed no way around or up it.

“Was this here? Do you think we are lost?”

But Ellen was out of sight.

“Ellen, where are you?” Christina shouted, and was relieved to get an answer from off to the left.

“Over here, bear left. We’re lost all right, but I think I know where we are.”

Christina glanced at her watch. They had been walking for only three quarters of an hour, she noted, furious to be so exhausted. It really felt as if they had been at it for half a day. Her knee, injured years ago in a fall from a horse, was complaining rather painfully. But if it was Ellen’s way to complain and then do the impossible, it was Christina’s way never to complain, never to admit that she could be in trouble or pushed beyond her strength—and then pay for her pride, and often do a botched job.

“Where do you think we are?” she asked when she had caught up with Ellen in a gloomy thicket of hemlock.

“I have an idea we have to keep bearing left and we may come out on that road near where the old people used to live.”

“You’ve a better head than I have. I haven’t a notion where we are.”

Christina sat down heavily on a fallen tree trunk as they emerged from hemlock into hardwood again. And Ellen, aware that her friend looked suddenly a bit done in, sat down beside her, although she was eager to find out whether her hunch about a way out onto the road was right. If not, they really were lost, and the compass might come in very handy indeed.

“Crazy old women, we are!” Christina panted, and laughed her bravura laugh.

“Better crazy than dead,” Ellen chuckled. “My heart hasn’t thumped like this since Micah fell down the well.”