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Lina’s eyes suddenly became introspective; then after a moment she rose slowly and stood in her tracks with an expression of deep thought, absent-mindedly took one step, then another, and after a pause a third, finally pulling up before the mirror, into which she stared vacantly for a moment, and then muttered defiantly as she turned away:–

“We ‘ll see, Master Charley.”

“Lina Maynard, what’s the matter with you?” cried the blonde, who had watched the pantomime with open mouth and growing eyes.

Lina turned and looked at her thoughtfully a moment, and then said with decisiveness:–

“You just go to Nell’s, my dear, and say I ‘m coming pretty soon; and if you say anything else, I ‘ll–I ‘ll never marry you.”

The girls were in the habit of doing as Lina wanted them to, and the blonde went, pouting with unappeased curiosity.

To gain exit from the Seminary was a simple matter in these lax days, and five minutes later Lina was walking rapidly along the highway, her lips firm set, but her eyes apprehensively reconnoitring the road ahead, with frequent glances to each side and behind. Once she got over the stone wall at the roadside in a considerable panic and crouched in the dewy grass while a belated villager passed, but it was without further adventure that she finally turned into the road leading behind Mr. Steele’s lot, and after a brief search identified the garden where she remembered seeing some particularly fine melons, when out walking a day or two previous. There they lay, just the other side the fence, faintly visible in the dim light She could not help congratulating herself, by the way, on the excellent behavior of her nerves, whose tense, fine-strung condition was a positive luxury, and she then and there understood how men might delight in desperate risks for the mere sake of the exalted and supreme sense of perfect self-possession that danger brings to some natures. Not, indeed, that she stopped to indulge any psychological speculations. The coast was clear; not a footfall or hoof-stroke sounded from the road, and without delay she began to look about for a wide place between the rails where she might get through. Just as she found it, she was startled by an unmistakable human snore, which seemed to come from a patch of high corn close to the melons, and she was fairly puzzled until she observed, about ten rods distant in the same line, an open attic window. That explained its origin, and with a passing self-congratulation that she had made up her mind not to marry a man that snored, she began to crawl through the fence. When halfway through the thought struck her,–wasn’t it like any other stealing, after all? This crawling between rails seemed dreadfully so. Her attitude, squeezed between two rails and half across the lower one, was neither graceful nor comfortable, and perhaps that fact shortened her scruples.

“It can’t be really stealing, for I don’t feel like a thief,” was the logic that settled it, and the next moment she had the novel sensation of having both feet surreptitiously and feloniously on another person’s land. She decidedly did n’t relish it, but she would go ahead now and think of it afterward. She was pretty sure she never would do it again, anyhow, experiencing that common sort of repentance beforehand for the thing she was about to do, the precise moral value of which it would be interesting to inquire. It ought to count for something, for, if it does n’t hinder the act, at least it spoils the fun of it. Here was a melon at her feet; should she take it? That was a bigger one further on, and her imperious conscientiousness compelled her to go ten steps further into the enemy’s country to get it, for now that she was committed to the undertaking, she was bound to do the best she could.