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68 such enterprises, Tom was through it in a twinkling, and well pleased with his discovery. The boat was still hibernating keel upwards on trestles. It would be a very strange thing if that day, of all others, were chosen for launching her for the summer. Determined, at any rate, to risk it, the runaway climbed into a little loft which might have been made for him, and settled down for the day; he rolled himself up in several folds of strawberry-netting, and made another quaint pillow of the box of a mowing-machine, whereon he slept soundly for several hours.

So the morning went; but the livelong afternoon he lay awake beneath the strawberry-nets; and these were his worst hours yet. They gave him pause for thought, and what thoughts were his! The almost inevitable end of this wild-goose flight—that was one. The quite inevitable fate of one standing his ground in circumstances so damning—that was another. The two together led him in circles, so that his brain reeled. The upshot was that he had taken the wrong, and yet the only course. Nor was that the worst, for brooding over all there was the thought of Claire, believing him guilty till her dying day, and never forgiving her own warm heart that had gone out in fearless loving-kindness to the bloody and deceitful man. To have loved one who ended on the gallows! What a memory to take through life! And the poor fellow’s love so quickened his insight that he shed tears for her, but regarded his own case with a growing stoicism.

Yet all the time the changed face of Blaydes at the moonlit stile, and that other foul one seen so shortly after, looked down on him side by side from the boathouse roof; and now he knew them for the faces of