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 whisking bit of fur! On a sudden he had become estranged and disassociated from these intimate surroundings, these sights and sounds which had so long been his companions. What had they to do with Dorothy!

She was telling him of her journey out and of the friends she was travelling with. She would have given him the home news, but, "Don't talk about anybody but yourself, Dorothy," he said. "That's all that I care about!"

At last they stood fronting the big boulder, whose side had been blasted off. Dorothy looked at the fragments of stone strewing the road, and at the massive granite surface, now withdrawn among the pine-trees. One huge branch, broken by a flying rock, hung down across its face. The whole scene told of the play of tremendous forces, and Wakefield's was the hand that had controlled and directed them. Obedient to long habit, he stooped, and lifting a good-sized fragment, sent it crashing down the bank into the brook.

"How strong you are, Harry!" she said.

There was something in the way she said it, that made him feel that he must break the spell, then and there, or he should be playing the mischief with his own peace of mind. Yet