"Have you heard anything about the man?" Dorothy asked cautiously, for it was almost dark, and the girls were walking back to the Dale homestead.
"Not a word," answered Tavia, "except that father thinks he has gone out of Dalton altogether."
"And I have not seen Miles Burlock all week," commented Dorothy, "You know I had been trying to get him to reform."
"Everybody seems to be trying to do that."
"Well, Ralph told me he had seen Burlock crying like a baby one day because a little girl asked him for a penny. And Ralph thinks perhaps there was some little girl in Miles' story,—a daughter maybe—and he suggested that I try my influence with Miles."
"Did he cry like a baby over you?" teased Tavia, with poor appreciation of her friend's efforts to help along the Liquor Crusade.
"Now please, Tavia, don't be absurd. There is something wonderfully winning about Mr. Burlock."
"Of course there is. Wicked people are always winners."
"I won't tell you one thing more!"
"Now Doro! Doro! You know I love to hear you talk that way. And if it were not so dark I could see your eyes show how deep they are, just like the Jacks-in-the-Pulpit I gathered in the woods yesterday. You are nothing like a wild flower, more like a beautiful pink and white hyacinth, that grows in the Douglass garden; but sometimes, when you pretend to be angry, you make me think of the wood flowers. They have such a way of blooming best when some other growing thing tries to stop them. Jacks-in-the-Pulpit grow right up through stones, and bloom in tangles of poison ivy."