"What for?" she asked, still clinging to her father's arm.
"As my way of thanking you that I am a free man this morning, and not, perchance, in irons myself, and on the road to the Governor, at Salem."
She laid her small hand in his broad palm, and the look he gave her as his fingers closed over it seemed to make her uncomfortable.
"It was very little I did," she declared quietly, drawing her hand away.
"So it may seem to you," he said gravely. "But had it not been done, the things that might have followed would show you otherwise."
In the afternoon the four young people set out to ride over to Hugh's place, where a widowed mother was anxiously expecting the arrival of her boy—and only child.
Jack, for reasons now well understood, kept close to Mary's bridle-rein; so it befell that Dorothy and Hugh were thrown upon one another's society more intimately than for some time heretofore.
As they rode leisurely along the Salem turnpike toward their destination, which lay away from the town, the young man exclaimed suddenly, "I don't believe another girl living would dare do such a thing, Dorothy, as you did last night!"
"Do cease prattling of last night," she said impatiently. "I am sick to death hearing of it."
"Are you?" And Hugh's laughing eyes widened with sober surprise. "I see no call for you to be so."