By this time the good Doctor Bertie had become the indignant Doctor Bertie.

"We can't have that at all!" he said incisively. "You did your whole duty in that bank matter; and it was a good deal more than most young women would have done. I'm not going to have you persecuted and harassed—not one minute! Where is this fellow stopping?"

The daughter shook her head. "I don't know. He gave me his card, but it has the New Orleans address only."

"Give it to me and I'll look him up to-morrow."

The card changed hands, and for a few minutes neither of them spoke. Then the daughter began again.

"I've had another shock this evening, too," she said, speaking this time in low tones and with eyes downcast. "This Mr. Griswold: tell me all you know about him, father."

"I don't know much of anything more than—thanks to Miss Grierson—all the town knows. They brought him here sick—she and her father—as I told you. That was some little time before you came home; perhaps while you were still on the way up the river. They didn't know who he was; and oddly enough, there wasn't anything in his clothes or luggage to tell them. I know that to be a fact because, at Miss Margery's request, I helped her overhaul his belongings. Afterward, in a talk with him, I learned that he had been robbed on the train; or at least, that was the supposition. He said there was money in one of the suit-cases, and we didn't find any."

"He is an author, they say; I don't seem to recall his name in any of my reading."

The doctor laughed good-naturedly. "Perhaps he is only one of the would-be's; I don't think it has got much farther than the hankering, as yet. There was a book manuscript in one of his valises, and I read a little of it. It was pretty poor stuff, I thought. But what was your other shock?"

"It was at the dinner-table; when you were joking him about the come-down from Mereside to us. Something he said—I couldn't remember, a minute afterward, just what it was—was spoken exactly in the voice, and with the same little trick of conciseness, as something that was said to me that never-to-be-forgotten evening on the saloon-deck promenade of the Belle Julie ... said by the man whose name was not John Wesley Gavitt."

"Oh, my dear girl!" was the father's instant protest; "that couldn't be, you know!"

"I know it couldn't," was the fair-minded rejoinder. "And I kept on telling myself so all the evening. I had to, father; for that once at the table wasn't the only time. Every few minutes he would say something to bring back that haunting half-recollection. It is only a coincidence, of course; it couldn't be anything else. But when he went away I couldn't help hoping that he would do one of two things; stay away altogether, or come often enough so that—oh, it's all nonsense, all of it: what difference can it make, to him or to me!"

"No difference at all." Doctor Bertie's membership was in that large confraternity of fathers whose blindness on the side of sentiment where their own daughters are concerned has become proverbial.

It was after he had taken up the latest copy of the Lancet and was beginning to bury himself in the editorials, that Charlotte reopened the threshed-out subject with a belated query.

"Did I understand you to say that he had lost all of his money?"

"Yes; practically all of it," said the father, without losing his hold upon what a certain great London physician was saying through the columns of the English medical journal.

But afterward, long after Charlotte had gone up to her room, he remembered, with a curious little start of half-awakened puzzlement, that some one, no longer ago than the yesterday, had told him that young Griswold was rich—or if not rich, at least "well-fixed."



XXVI

PITFALLS

What arguments Edward Raymer used to convince his mother and sister that Griswold as a participating partner was better than Jasper Grierson figuring as the man in possession, the Wahaskan gossips were unable to guess. But the fact remained. Within a week from the day when Raymer, angrily jubilant, had rescued his imperilled stock, it was pretty generally known that Kenneth Griswold, the writing-man, had become the fourth member in the close corporation of the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works, and Wahaska was eagerly earning Broffin's contemptuous characterization of it by discussing the business affair in all its possible and probable bearings upon the Raymers, the Griersons, and the newly elected directory of the Pineboro Railroad.

Of all this buzzing of the gossip bees the person most acutely concerned heard little or nothing. Griswold's intimation to Raymer that he wished only to be a silent partner had been made in good faith; and beyond a few purely perfunctory visits to the plant across the railroad tracks, made because Raymer had insisted that he go over the books and learn for himself the exact condition of the business into which he had put his money, Griswold took no more than an advisory part in the industrial activities. To Raymer's urgings there was always the same answer: the writing fit was on him and he had no time.

Taken for what it was worth, the writing excuse was sufficiently valid. In the fallow period of the slow convalescence the imaginative field had grown fertile for the plough, and a new book, borrowing nothing from the old save the sociological background, was already under way. Digging deeply in the inspirational field, Griswold speedily became oblivious to most of his encompassments; to all of them, indeed, save those which bore directly upon the beloved task. Among these, he counted the frequent afternoon visits to Mereside, and the scarcely less frequent evenings spent in the Farnham home. Again in harmony with the later prefigurings, he was using each of the young women as a foil for the other in the outworking of his plot; and he welcomed it as a sign of growth that the story in its new form was acquiring verisimilitude and becoming gratefully, and at times, he persuaded himself, quite vividly, human.

When he got well into the swing of it and was turning out a chapter every three or four days, he fell easily into the habit of slipping the last instalment into his pocket when he went to Mereside. Margery Grierson was adding generously to his immense obligation to her; hoping only to find a friendly listener, he found a helpful collaborator. More than once, when his own imagination was at fault, she was able to open new vistas in the humanities for him, apparently drawing upon a reserve of intuitive conclusions compared with which his own hard-bought store of experimental knowledge was almost puerile.

"I wish you would tell me the secret of your marvellous cleverness!" he exclaimed, on one of the June afternoons when he had been reading to her in the cool half-shadows of the Mereside library. "You are only a child in years: how can you know with such miraculous certainty what other people would think and do under conditions about which you can't possibly know anything experimentally? It's beyond me!"

"There are many things beyond you yet, dear boy; many, many things," was her laughing rejoinder; from which it will be inferred that the episode in the Farmers' and Merchants' burglar-proof had become an episode forgotten—or at least forgiven. "You know men—a little; but when it comes to the women ... well, if I didn't keep continually nagging at you, your two heroines—with neither of whom you are really in love—would degenerate into rag dolls. They would, actually."

"That's true; I can see it clearly enough when you point it out," he admitted, putting his craftsman pride underfoot, as he was always obliged to do in these talks with her. "I should be discouraged if you didn't keep on telling me that the story, as a story, is good."

"It is good; it is a big story," she asserted, with kindling enthusiasm. "The plot, so far as you have gone with it, is fine; and that is where you leave me away behind. I don't see how you could ever think it out. And the character-drawing is fine, too, some of it. Your Fleming is as far beyond me as your Fidelia seems to be beyond you."

"Fleming is human in every drop of his blood," he boasted.

"I don't doubt it for a moment; all the little ear-marks of humanity are there, and I know in reason that he must be a type. But I have never met the man himself; and I am sure I shall be scared silly if I ever do meet him. Think of being shut up in any little corner of the world with a man who has convinced himself that he can commit any crime in the calendar so long as he believes the particular one he chooses isn't a crime!"

"Crime, so-called, is like everything else in this world; a thing to be defined strictly by the motive and the point of view," said Griswold, mounting his hobby with joyous alacrity.

"I know; that is what you say"—this with an adorable uptilt of the pretty chin and a flash of the dark eyes which an instant before had been slumbrous wells of studious abstraction. "But your Fleming is going to prove the contrary; it may not be what you want him to do, but it will be what he will insist upon doing before you get through with him. You have already indicated it in the story, unconsciously, perhaps. When Fidelia surprises him, Fleming is almost ready to kill her; not in defense of the principle he has set up, but to save his own miserable life."

"That is a part of his humanity," insisted the craftsman stubbornly. "You don't know Fleming yet. Have you ever met Fidelia?"

"Not as you have drawn her—no. She is too unutterably fine. If she had a single shred of humanity about her, I should suspect you of meaning to fall in love with her, farther along—to the humiliation and despair of poor Joan, who, as you say, is a mere daughter of men."

"But how about Joan?" he fretted. "Is she out of drawing, too?"

"Yes; you are distorting her the other way—making her too inhumanly worldly and insincere." Then, with an abruptness that was like a slap in the face: "If you didn't spend so many evenings at Doctor Bertie's, you would get both Fidelia and Joan in better drawing."

He flushed and drew himself up, with the stabbed amour propre prompting him to make some stinging retort contrasting the wells of truth with the brackish waters of sheer worldliness. Then he saw how inadequate it would be; how utterly impossible it was to meet this charmingly vindictive young person upon any grounds save those of her own choosing.

"That is the first really unkind thing I have ever heard you say," was the mild reproach which was all that the reactionary second thought would sanction.

"Unkind to whom?—to you, or to Miss Farnham?"

"Ask yourself," he countered weakly; and she laughed at him.

"There is another of your failings, Kenneth. You haven't always the courage of your convictions. What you are thinking is that I am a spiteful little cat. Why don't you say it out loud, like a man?"

"Because I'm not thinking it," he denied, adding: "But I do think you are a little inclined to be unfair to Miss Charlotte."

"Am I? Let us see if I am. I accuse her of nothing but a slavish devotion to custom and the conventions. What did she say when you read her the chapter before this one: where Fidelia goes down to the dining-room at midnight and finds Fleming breaking into the silver-safe where the money is hidden?"

"I'm not reading the story to her," he admitted, and again she laughed.

"But you do talk it over with her; you couldn't help doing that," she persisted.

"Sometimes," he allowed.

"Well, what did she say when you came to that part where Fidelia makes Fleming sit down while she tries to convince him that house-breaking is a crime. You don't dare tell me what she said."

Griswold did it, with a firm convincement that he was thereby breaking a sacred confidence. But the alluring lips and eyes were irresistible when he was fairly within their influence.

"I merely suggested the scene as something that might be done," he explained. "She did not approve of it. Her objection was that the Fidelias in real life don't do such things."

"They don't," was Miss Margery's flippant agreement. "And your letting your Fidelia do it is the one redeeming thing you have done in your drawing of her. Just the same, with all your ingenuity you leave one with the firm conviction that she will never, under any circumstances, do such an unconventional thing again; never, never, never! And that is a false note."

"Why is it?"

"Because it leaves out the common sex-factor; the one that is shared alike by the Fidelias and the Joans and all the rest of us."

"And that is——"

"Just plain, every-day inconsistency—our dearest heritage from good old Mother Eve. Being a mere man, you can't understand that, so you neglect to put it into your women."

"But I can't let that stand," he objected. "You must allow the ideal some little latitude. Fidelia was not inconsistent, either in striving with Fleming, or in betraying him."

Miss Grierson's perfect shoulders twitched in a little shrug of impatience.

"Not that time, maybe; with Fleming standing by to tell her that she must be true to herself at whatever cost to him. But the next time—if she should happen to fall in love with the gentleman who was breaking into her father's house-safe...." She laughed in sheer mockery and misquoted a couplet from Riley for him:

"'There, little boy, don't cry; I have broken your doll, I know!'"

"Break some more of them if you can," he urged. "A few more casualties won't make any difference."

"There is only the boy-doll left; and I don't like to break boy-dolls."

"Fleming, you mean? I give you leave. Hammer him until he bleeds sawdust, if the spirit moves you."

Miss Grierson had been curled up like a comfortable kitten in the depths of a great lounging chair—her favorite attitude while he was reading to her. But now she sat up and locked her fingers over one knee.

"I said a little while ago that I'd never met Fleming, and I haven't. But I like him, and I'm sorry to see him putting himself in for such a savage hereafter. He is a good man, like other good men, with the single difference that he thinks he isn't bound by the traditions. He believes he can commit what the traditionary people call a crime without paying the penalties. He can't: nobody can."

Griswold's smile was the superior smile of the writing craftsman. "That is merely a matter of invention," he asserted. "He can escape the penalties if he is smart enough."

"You mistake me," she interposed. "I don't mean the physical penalties; though as to these the old saying that murder will out must have some foundation in fact. Let that go: we'll suppose him clever enough to make his escape and to outwit or outfight his enemies. I don't say he couldn't do it successfully; but I do say that, with the hazards confronting him at every turn, he will find the real criminal in him growing and possessing him, making him think things and do things of the utter depravity of which he has never had any doubt."

While she was speaking Griswold could feel the change she was describing stealing over him like a nightmare, and when she stopped he passed his hand over his eyes as one awaking from a vaguely terrifying dream.

"You mean that there is a real criminal in every man?" he questioned, and the question seemed to say itself of its own volition.

"In every man and in every woman: how can you be a writer and not know that? Ask yourself. You admit the existence of the good and the bad, and ordinarily you choose the good and shudder at the bad: tell me—haven't there been times when the most horrible crimes were possible to you?—times when, with the littlest tipping of the balance, you could have killed somebody? You needn't answer: I know you have looked over that brink, because I have looked over it myself, more than once. And, sooner or later, Fleming will find himself looking over it—with all the horrors of the penalties pushing and shoving at him to tumble him into the gulf."

Griswold did not reply. He was gathering up the scattered pages of his manuscript and replacing them in order. When he spoke again it was of a matter entirely irrelevant.

"I had an odd experience the other evening," he said. "I had been dining with the Raymers and was walking back to Shawnee Street. A little newsboy named Johnnie Fergus turned up from somewhere at one of the street crossings and tried to sell me a paper—at eleven o'clock at night! I bought one and joked him about being out so late; and from that on I couldn't get rid of him. He went all the way home with me, talking a blue streak and acting as if he were afraid of something or somebody. I remembered afterward that he is the boy who takes care of your boat. Is there anything wrong with him?"

Miss Grierson had left her chair and had gone to stand at one of the windows.

"Nothing that I know of," she said. "He is a bright boy—too bright for his own good, I'm afraid. But I can explain—a little. Johnnie has taken a violent fancy to you for some reason, and he has fallen into the boyish habit of weaving all sorts of romances around you. I think he reads too many exciting stories and tries to make you the hero of them. He told me the other day that he was sure somebody was 'spotting' you."

Griswold looked up quickly. Miss Grierson was still facing the window, and he was glad that she had not seen his nervous start.

"'Spotting' me?" he laughed. "Where did he get that idea?"

"How should I know? But he had made himself believe it; he even went so far as to describe the man. Oh, I can assure you Johnnie has an imagination; I've tested it in other ways."

"I should think so!" said the man who also had an imagination, and shortly afterward he took his leave.

An hour later the same afternoon, Broffin, from his post of observation on the Winnebago porch, saw the writing-man cross the street and enter a hardware shop. Having nothing better to do, he, too, crossed the street and, in passing, looked into the open door of Simmons & Kleifurt's. What he saw brought him back at the end of a reflective stroll around the public square. When he entered the shop the clerk was putting a formidable array of weapons back into their show-case niches. Broffin lounged up and began to handle the pistols.

"If I knew enough about guns to be able to tell 'em apart, I might buy one," he said half-humorously. And then: "You must've been having a mighty particular customer—to get so many of 'em out."

"It was Mr. Griswold, Mr. Ed. Raymer's new partner," said the clerk. "And he was pretty particular; wouldn't have anything but these new-fashioned automatics. Said he wanted something that would be quick and sure, and I guess he's got it—I sold him two of 'em."

Broffin played with the stock long enough to convince the clerk that he was only a counter lounger with no intention of buying. "Took two of 'em, did he?—for fear one might make him sick, I reckon," he said, with the half-humorous grin still lurking under the drooping mustaches. "Automatic thirty-twos, eh? Well, I ain't goin' to try to hold your Mr.—Griscom, did you call him?—up none after this. He might git me."

Whereupon, having found out what he wanted to know, he lounged out again and went back to the hotel to smoke another of the reflective cigars in the porch chair which had come to be his by right of frequent and long-continued occupancy.



XXVII

IN THE SHADOWS

Not counting the vague and rather pointless disturbment which had culminated in the purchase of a pair of pistols, Griswold had left the Mereside library considerably shaken, not in his convictions, to be sure, but in his confidence in his own powers of imaginative analysis. For this cause it required a longer after-dinner stay at the Farnhams' than he had been allowing himself, to re-establish the norm of self-assurance.

This was coming to be the net result of a better acquaintance with Charlotte Farnham; a growth in the grace of self-containment, and in a just appreciation of the mighty power that lies in propinquity—the propinquity of an inspiring ideal. Miss Farnham was never enthusiastic; that, perhaps, would be asking too much of an ideal; but what she lacked in warmth was made up in cool sanity, backed by a moral sense that seemed never to waver. Unerringly she placed her finger upon the human weaknesses in his book-people, and unfalteringly she bade him reform them.

For his Fidelia, as he described her, she exhibited a gentle affection, tempered by a compassionate pity for her weaknesses and waverings; an attitude, he fatuously told himself, forced upon her because her own standards were so much higher than any he could delineate or conceive. For Joan there was also compassion, but it was mildly contemptuous.

"If I did not know that you are incapable of doing such a thing, I might wonder if you are not drawing your Joan from the life, Mr. Griswold," she said, a little coldly, on this same evening of rehabilitations. "Since such characters are to be found in real life, I suppose they may have a place in a book. But you must not commit the unpardonable sin of making your readers condone the evil in her for the sake of the good."

"May we not sometimes condone a little evil for the sake of a great good?" he pleaded in extenuation.

Her answer was rather disconcerting.

"Life is full of just such temptations; the temptation to bargain with expediency. We can only pray blindly to be delivered in the hour of trial."

They were sitting together on the vine-sheltered porch, and the street electrics with the lamplight from the sitting-room windows served merely to temper the velvety gloom of the summer night. He would have given much to be able to see her face, but the darkness came between.

"That opens the door to the larger question which is always asking for its answer," he said, letting the thought that was uppermost slip into speech. "At its very best, life is a compromise, not necessarily between good and evil, but between the thing possible and the thing impossible. It is not until we are strong enough to break the shacklings of the traditions that we are free to drive the best obtainable bargain with destiny."

As at other times, he was once more yielding to the impulse which was always prompting him to apply the acid test to the pure gold of the ideal. Heretofore the test had revealed no trace of earthly alloy; but now the result filled him with vague dismay.

"So you have said many times before," she rejoined, and her voice was as the voice of one groping in the dark. "I—I have a confession to make, Mr. Griswold: I have held out against you, knowing all the time that you were right; that life is full of these bitter compromises which we are forced to accept. Please forget what I have said about your Fidelia and—and your Joan. You are trying to make them human, and that is as it should be."

Griswold could scarcely believe the evidence of his senses. He told himself fiercely that he would never believe, without the convincement of fact, that the ideal could step down from its pedestal.

"You are meaning to be kind to me now, at the expense of your convictions, Miss Charlotte," he protested warmly.

"No," she denied gravely. "Listen, and you shall judge. Once, only a short time ago, I was brought face to face with one of these terrible compromises. In a single instant, and by no fault of my own, the dreadful shears of fate were thrust into my hands, and conscience—what I have been taught to call the Christian conscience—told me that with them I must snip the thread of a man's life. Are you listening?"

His lips were dry and he had to moisten them before he could say: "Yes, go on; I am listening."

"The man was a criminal and he was a fugitive from justice. Conscience—my conscience—insisted that it was my plain duty to raise the hue and cry. For a long time I couldn't do it; and then——"

He waited until the silence had grown unbearable before he prompted her. "And then?"

"And then chance threw us together. A new world was opened to me in those few moments. I had thought that there could be no possible question between simple right and wrong, but almost in his first word the man convinced me that, whatever I might think or the world might say, his conscience had fully and freely acquitted him. And he proved it; proved it so that I can never doubt it as long as I live. He made me do what my conscience had been telling me I ought to do—just as your Fleming makes Fidelia do."

"You denounced him?" he said, and he strove desperately to make the saying completely colorless.

"Yes."

"And he was taken?"

"He was; but he made his escape again, almost at once. He is still a free man."

Instantly the primitive instinct of self-preservation, the instinct of the hunted fugitive, sprang alert in the listener.

"How can you be sure of that?" he asked, and in his own ears his voice sounded like the clang of an alarm bell.

Again a silence fell, surcharged, this one, with all the old frightful possibilities. Once more the loathsome fever quickened the pulses of the man at bay, and the curious needle-like prickling of the skin came to signal the return of the homicidal fear-frenzy. The reaction to the normal racked him like the passing of a mortal sickness when his accusing angel said in her most matter-of-fact tone:

"I know he is free; I have it on the best possible authority. The detectives who are searching for him have been here to see me—or, at least, one of them has."

The hunted one laid hold of the partial reprieve with a mighty grip and drew himself out of the reactionary whirlpool.

"To see you? Why should they trouble you?"

"On general man-hunting principles, I suppose," was the calm reply. "Since I gave the necessary information once, they seem to think I can give it again. It is very annoying."

"It is an outrage!" declared the listener warmly. And afterward, with only the proper friendly emphasis: "I hope it is an annoyance past."

His companion leaned forward in her chair and cautiously parted the leafy vine screen.

"Look across the street—under those trees at the water's edge: do you see him?"

Griswold looked and was reasonably sure that he could make out the shadowy figure of a man leaning against one of the trees.

"That is my shadow," she said, lowering her voice; "Mr. Matthew Broffin, of the Colburne Detective Agency, in New Orleans. He has a foolish idea that I am in communication with the man he is searching for, and he was brutal enough to tell me so. What he expects to accomplish by keeping an absurd watch upon our house and dogging everybody who comes and goes, I can't imagine."

"You have told your father?" said Griswold, anxious to learn how far this new alarm fire had spread.

"Certainly; and he has made his protest. But it doesn't do any good; the man keeps on spying, as you see. But we have wandered a long way from your book. I've been trying to prove to you that I am not fit to criticise it."

"No; you mustn't mistake me. I haven't been coming to you for criticism," was Griswold's rather incoherent reply; and when the talk threatened to lapse into the commonplaces, he took his leave. Oddly enough, as he thought, when he was unlatching the gate and had shifted one of the newly purchased automatic pistols from his hip pocket to an outside pocket of the light top-coat he was wearing, the shadowy figure under the lake-shading trees had disappeared.

It was only a few minutes after the lingering dinner guest had gone when the doctor came out on the porch, bringing his long-stemmed pipe for a bedtime whiff in the open air.

"You are losing your beauty sleep, little girl," he said, dropping into the chair lately occupied by the guest. "Did you find out anything more to-night?"

The daughter did not reply at once, and when she did there was a note of freshly summoned hardihood in her voice.

"We were both mistaken," she affirmed. "Coincidences are always likely to be misleading. I am sorry I told you about them. He has certainly been a present help in time of need to Edward."

"How did you reach your conclusion?" inquired the pipe smoker, upon whom the coincidences were still actively exerting their influence.

"It came out in the talk this evening. He has been rather ridiculously putting me upon a pedestal, trying to make me fit an ideal character in his book, I think. To prove to him that I am only human, I told him the story of what happened on the Belle Julie. And, to cap the climax, I pointed out our friend Mr. Broffin, who was on guard again—as usual—and told him who the house watcher was and what he wanted. It didn't affect him any more than it would any friend of the family. He was interested in the story as a story, and—and in its bearing upon me as a—as a life-experience. But that was all."

"You may be right; you probably are right," was the father's comment after a thoughtful whiff or two had intervened. "Just the same, I've looked up the dates in my case book: if your Gavitt man, escaping from the officers in St. Louis, had taken the first train for Wahaska, he would have reached here at precisely the same moment that the sick Mr. Griswold did. Also, he would have been careful to remove all the little tags and telltales from his brand-new clothes—which was what Mr. Griswold very evidently had done. Also, again, the amount of money which Mr. Griswold has put into the Raymer capital stock tallies to within ten thousand dollars of the amount your Gavitt fellow walked away with in New Orleans. Also, number three, Mr. Griswold acted very much like a man who had lost all he had in the world when I told him that Miss Grierson and I had found no money in his suit-cases; and——"

"That is the weak link in your chain, isn't it?" objected the daughter. "You remember he told me on the boat that he had lost the money?"

Again the father took counsel of the long-stemmed pipe.

"It might be," he said, after a reflective pause. "It would be, if Miss Grierson could be safely eliminated from the equation. Unhappily, she can't be."

"I don't care!" came from the depths of the porch rocking-chair. "If this miserable detective arrests him and appeals to me, I shall simply refuse to know anything about it! I wish you'd tell this man Broffin so when you meet him again."

As before, the good little doctor had recourse to his pipe, and it was not until his daughter got up to go in that he said gently: "One other word, Charlie, girl: are you altogether sure that the wish isn't father to the thought—about Griswold?"

"Don't be absurd, papa!" she said scornfully, passing swiftly behind his chair to reach the door; and with that answer he was obliged to be content.



XXVIII

BROKEN LINKS

It was on the second day after the pistol-buying incident in Simmons & Kleifurt's that Broffin, wishful for solitude and a chance to think in perspective, took to the woods.

In the moment of lost temper, when he had threatened angrily to play an indefinite waiting game, prolonging it until his man should walk into the trap, nothing had really been farther from his intentions. As a matter of fact, there were the best of business reasons why he should not waste another day in following, or attempting to follow, the cold trail. Other cases were pressing, and his daily mail from the New Orleans head-quarters brought urgings impatient and importunate; and on the third day following the sleeveless interview with the doctor's daughter he had paid his bill at the Winnebago House and had packed his grip for the southward flight by the afternoon train.

Twenty minutes before train-time a telegram from the New Orleans office had reopened the closed and crossed-off account of the Bayou State Security robbery. It was a bare line in answer to his own wire advising the office that he was about to return, but its significance was out of all proportion to its length. "B. S. S. man is in your town. Important letter to-day's mail," was all it said, but that was sufficient. Broffin had promptly told the clerk of the Winnebago that he had changed his mind, and forty-eight hours afterward he had the letter.

Like the telegram, the mail communication was significant but inconclusive. One Patrick Sheehan, a St. Louis cab driver, dying, had made confession to his priest. For a bribe of two hundred dollars he had aided and abetted the escape of a criminal on a day and date corresponding to the mid-April arrival of the steamer Belle Julie at St. Louis. Afterward he had driven the man to an up-town hotel (name not given) and had obtained from the clerk the man's name and destination. In his letter enclosing the confession the priest went on to say that the penitent had evidently had a severe struggle with his conscience. A mistaken sense of gratitude to the man who had bribed him had led him to tear off and destroy the upper half of the card given him by the up-town hotel clerk, and with the reminder gone he could not recall the man's name. But the destination address, "Wahaska, Minnesota," had been preserved, and the torn portion of the card bearing it was submitted with the confession.

With this new clue for an incentive, Broffin had immediately put his nose to the cold trail again. All other things apart, the torn card conclusively proved the correctness of the obstinately maintained hypothesis. If the robber had really chosen Wahaska for his hiding-place, he had done so merely because it was Miss Farnham's home. The boldness of the thing appealed instantly to a like quality in the detective, and he was not entirely unprepared for the eye-opening shock which came when he began to suspect that Griswold, the writing-man, was the man he was looking for.

The premonitory symptoms of the shock had manifested themselves when he began to note the regularity of Griswold's visits to the house in Lake Boulevard. Then came the pistol-buying episode, closely following an investment of money possible only to a capitalist—or a robber. Broffin worked quickly after this, tracing Griswold's record back to its Wahaskan beginnings and shadowing his man so faithfully that at any hour of the day or night he could have clapped the arresting hand upon his shoulder. Still he hesitated. Once, in his Secret Service days, he had arrested the wrong man, and the smart of the prosecution for false imprisonment would rankle as long as he lived.

This was why he took to the woods on the afternoon of the second day following Griswold's pistol purchase. He felt himself growing short-sighted from the very nearness of things. The single necessity now was for absolute and unshakable identification. To establish this, three witnesses, and three only, could be called upon. Of the three, two had failed signally—Miss Farnham because she had her own reasons for blocking the game, and President Galbraith.... That was another chapter in the book of failure. Broffin had learned that the president was stopping at the De Soto Inn, and he had manoeuvred to bring Mr. Galbraith face to face with Griswold in the Grierson bank on the day after the pistol-buying. To his astonishment and disgust the president had shaken his head irritably, adding a rebuke. "Na, na, man; your trade makes ye over-suspeecious. That's Mr. Griswold, the writer-man and a friend of the Griersons. Miss Madgie was telling me about him last week. He's no more like the robber than you are. Haven't I told ye the man was bearded like a tyke?"

With two of the three eye-witnesses refusing to testify, there remained only Johnson, the paying teller of the Bayou State Security. Broffin was considering the advisability of wiring for Johnson when he passed the last of the houses on the lakeside drive and struck into the country road which led by cool and shaded forest windings to the resort hotel at the head of the southern bay. If Johnson should fail—and in view of the fact that President Galbraith had failed it was a possibility to be reckoned with—there remained only two doubtful expedients. With Patrick Sheehan's confession to point the way it might be possible to trace the transformed deck-hand from his final interview with McGrath on the Belle Julie step by step to his appearance, sick and delirious, in Wahaska twenty-four hours later. This was one of the expedients. The other was to take the long chance by clapping the handcuffs upon Griswold in some moment of unpreparedness. It was a well-worn trick, and it did not always succeed in surprising the admission of guilt necessary to make it hold good. And if it should not hold good, there might be consequences. As we have noted, Broffin had once clapped the handcuffs on the wrong man.

Chewing an extinct cigar and ruminating thoughtfully over his problem, Broffin had followed the windings of the country road well into the lake-enclosing forest when he heard the rattle of wheels and the hoof-beats of a horse. Presently the vehicle overtook and passed him. It was Miss Grierson's trap, drawn by the big English trap-horse, with Miss Grierson herself holding the reins and Raymer lounging comfortably in the spare seat.

The sight of the pair moved Broffin to speech apostrophic—when the two were out of earshot. "You're the little lady I'd like to back into a corner," he muttered. "What you know about this business—and wouldn't tell, not if you was gettin' the third degree for it—would tie up all the broken strings in a hurry. How do I know you didn't help him to get out of St. Louis? How do I know that the whole blame sick play wasn't a plant from start to finish?" He stopped and struck viciously at a roadside weed with the switch he had cut. It was a new idea, an idea with promise; and when he went on, the reflective excursion had become a journey with a purpose. Chance had been good to him now and then in his hard-working career: perhaps it would be good to him again. Having let one woman put a stumbling-block in his way, perhaps it was going to even things up by making another woman remove it.

Half an hour later Broffin had followed the huge hoof-prints of the great English trap-horse to the driveway portal of the De Soto grounds where they were lost on the pebbled carriage approach. Strolling on through the grounds into the lake-fronting lobby of the Inn, he was soon able to account for Raymer. The young iron-founder was evidently on business bent. He was sitting in the lobby with a man whom Broffin recognized as the master car builder of the Pineboro Railroad, and the two were discussing mechanical details over a thick file of blue-prints spread out on Raymer's knees. The smile under Broffin's drooping mustaches was a grin of instant comprehension. Miss Grierson, driving Raymer's way, had picked up the iron-founder and brought him along to the business appointment. It was a way she had—when the candidate for the spare seat in the trap happened to be young and good-looking.

Having placed Raymer, Broffin went in search of Miss Grierson. He found her on the broad veranda, alone, and for the moment unoccupied. How to make the attack so direct and so overwhelming that it could not be withstood was the only remaining question; and Broffin had answered it to his own satisfaction, and was advancing through an open French window directly behind Miss Grierson's chair to put the answer into effect, when the opportunity was snatched away. Raymer, with his roll of blue-prints under his arm and his business with the master car builder apparently concluded, came down the veranda and took the chair next to Miss Grierson's.

Broffin dropped back into the writing-room alcove for which the open French window was the outlet and sat down to bide his time, taking care that the chair which he noiselessly placed for himself should be out of sight from the veranda, but not out of earshot. It seemed very unlikely that the two young people who were enjoying the Minnedaskan view would say anything worth listening to; but the ex-harrier of moonshine-makers was of those who discount all chances.

For a time nothing happened. The two on the veranda talked of the view, of the coming regatta, of the latest lawn social given by the Guild of St. John's. Broffin surmised that they were waiting for the trap to be brought around from the hotel stables, though why there should be a delay was not so evident. But in any event his opportunity was lost unless he could contrive to isolate the young woman again. It was while he was groping for the compassing means that Raymer said:

"It's a shame to make you wait this way, Miss Madge. McMurtry said he had an appointment with Mr. Galbraith for three o'clock, and he had to go and keep it. But he ought to be down again by this time. Don't wait for me if you want to go back to town. I can get a lift from somebody."

"That would be nice, wouldn't it?" was the good-natured retort. "To make you tie up your own horse in town and then to leave you stranded away out here three miles from nowhere! I think I see myself doing such a thing! Besides, I haven't a thing to do but to wait."

Broffin shifted the extinct cigar he was chewing from one corner of his mouth to the other and pulled his soft hat lower over his eyes. He, too, could wait. There was a little stir on the veranda; a rustling of silk petticoats and the click of small heels on the hardwood floor. Broffin could not forbear the peering peep around the sheltering window draperies. Miss Grierson had left her seat and was pacing a slow march up and down before Raymer's chair, apparently for Raymer's benefit. The watcher behind the window draperies drew back quickly when she made the turn to face his way, arguing sapiently that whatever significance their further talk might hold would be carefully and thoughtfully neutralized if Miss Grierson should see him. That she had not seen him became a fact sufficiently well-assured when she sat down again and began to speak of Griswold.

"How is the new partnership going, by this time," she asked, after the manner of one who re-winnows the chaff of the commonplaces in the hope of finding grain enough for the immediate need.

"So far as Griswold is concerned, you wouldn't notice that there is a partnership," laughed the iron-founder. "I can't make him galvanize an atom of interest in his investment. All I can get out of him is, 'Don't bother me; I'm busy.'"

"Mr. Griswold is in a class by himself, don't you think?" was the questioning comment.

"He is all kinds of a good fellow; that's all I know, and all I ask to know," answered Raymer loyally.

"I believe that—now," said his companion, with the faintest possible emphasis upon the time-word.

Broffin marked the emphasis, and the pause that preceded it, and leaned forward to miss no word.

"Meaning that there was a time when you didn't believe it?" Raymer asked.

"Meaning that there was a time when he had me scared half to death," confessed the one who seemed always to say the confidential thing as if it were the most trivial. "Do you remember one day in the library, when you found me looking over the files of the newspapers for the story of the robbery of the Bayou State Security Bank in New Orleans?"

Raymer remembered it very well, and admitted it.

"That was the time when the dreadful idea was scaring me stiff," she went on. "You remember the story, don't you? how the president—our Mr. Galbraith here—was held up at the point of a pistol and marched to the paying teller's window, and how the robber escaped on a river steamboat and was recognized by somebody and was arrested at St. Louis?"

"Yes; I remember it all very clearly. Also I recollect how the second newspaper notice told how he escaped from the officers at St. Louis. Wasn't there something about a young woman being mixed up in it some way?"

"There was: she was the one who recognized the robber disguised as a deck-hand on the boat."

Raymer seemed to have forgotten his impatience for a renewal of the interview with the Pineboro Railroad master car builder.

"I don't seem to recall any mention of that in the newspapers," he said half-doubtfully.

"The newspaper reporters didn't put two and two together, but I did," asserted the sharer of confidences. "There was a young woman getting a draft cashed at the teller's window when the robbery was committed. The bank people didn't know her, so she must have been travelling. You see it's simple enough when you put your mind to it."

"But you haven't told me how you were scared," Raymer suggested.

"I'm coming to that. This escape we read about happened on a certain day in April. It was the very day on which poppa met me on my way back from Florida, and we took the eleven-thirty train north that night. You haven't forgotten that Mr. Griswold was a passenger on that same train?"

"But, goodness gracious, Miss Margery! any number of people were passengers on that train. You surely wouldn't——"

"Hush!" she said, and through the lace window hangings Broffin saw her lift a warning finger. "What I am telling you, Mr. Raymer, is in the strictest confidence; we mustn't let a breath of it get out. But that wasn't all. Mr. Griswold was dreadfully sick, and, of course, he couldn't tell us anything about himself. But while he was delirious he was always muttering something about money, money; money that he had lost and couldn't find, or money that he had found and couldn't lose. Then when we thought he couldn't possibly get well, Doctor Bertie and I ransacked his suit-cases for cards or letters or something that would tell us who he was and where he came from. There wasn't the littlest thing!"

"And that was when you began to suspect?" queried Raymer.

"That was when the suspicion began to torture me. I fought it; oh, you don't know how hard I fought it! There he was, lying sick and helpless; utterly unable to do a thing or say a word in his own defence; and yet, if he were the robber, of course, we should have to give him up. It was terrible!"

"I should say so," was Raymer's sympathetic comment. "How did you get it straightened out, at last?"

"It hasn't been altogether straightened out until just lately—within the past few days," she went on gravely. "After he began to get well, I made him talk to me—about himself, you know. There didn't seem to be anything to conceal. At different times he told me all about his home, and his mother, whom he barely remembers, and the big-hearted, open-handed father who made money so easily in his profession—he was the Griswold, the great architect, you know—that he gave it away to anybody who wanted it—but I suppose he has told you all this?"

"No; at least, not very much of it."

Miss Grierson went on smoothly, falling sympathetically into the reminiscent vein.

"Kenneth went to college without ever having known what it was to lack anything in reason that money could buy. A little while after he was graduated his father died."

"Leaving Kenneth poor, I suppose; he has intimated as much to me, once or twice," said Raymer.

"Leaving him awfully poor. He wanted to learn to write, and for a long time he stayed on in New York, living just any old way, and having a dreadfully hard time of it, I imagine, though he would never say much about that part of it. He says he was studying the under-dog, and he has told me some of the most harrowing things he has seen and been through: one of them had a little child in it—a baby that he found in a tenement where the father and mother had both died of starvation ... think of it! And he took the baby away and fed it and kept it...."

Broffin, sitting behind the window draperies, had his elbows on his knees and his head tightly clamped between his hands. He was striving, as the dying strive for breath, to remember. Where had he heard this self-same story of the man who had fought some sort of a studying fight in the back-water of the New York slums? In every detail it came back to him like the recurring scenes of a vivid dream; but the key-notes of time, place, and the man's identity were gone; lost beyond any power of the groping mentality to recall them.

"That is why he thinks he is a Socialist," Miss Grierson was going on evenly. "I've been wondering if you knew these things, and I've wanted to tell you. I've thought it might help you to understand him better if you knew something of what he has been through. But we were talking about my dreadful suspicion. It persisted, you know, right along through everything. At last, I felt that I just must know, at whatever cost. One day when we were driving, I brought him here and—and introduced him to Mr. Galbraith. I was so scared that I could taste it—but I did it!"

Raymer laughed. "Of course, nothing came of it?"

"Nothing at all; and the reaction pretty nearly made me faint. They just made talk, like any two freshly introduced people would, and that was all there was of it. You'd say that was proof enough, wouldn't you? Surely Mr. Galbraith would recognize the man who robbed him?"

"Certainly; there couldn't be any doubt of that."

"That's what I said. And then, right out of a clear sky, came another proof that was even more convincing. Do you happen to know who the young woman was who discovered the bank robber on the steamboat?"

"I? How should I know?"

"I didn't know but she had told you," was the demure rejoinder. "It was Charlotte Farnham."

"What!" ejaculated Raymer. But he was not more deeply moved than was the man behind the window curtains. If Broffin's dead cigar had not been already reduced to shapeless inutility, Miss Grierson's cool announcement, carrying with it the assurance that his secret was no secret, would have settled it.

"It's so," she was adding calmly. "I found out. She and her aunt were passengers on the Belle Julie; that was the boat the robber escaped on, you remember. Doctor Bertie told me that. And she was the young woman who was having the draft cashed in the Bayou State Security. How do I know? Because her father bought the draft at poppa's bank, and in the course of time it came back with the Bayou State Security's dated paying stamp on it. See how easy it was!"

Raymer's laugh was not altogether mirthful.

"You are a witch," he said. "Is there anything that you don't know?"

"Not so very many things that I really need to know," was the mildly boastful retort. "But you see, now, how foolish my suspicions were. Mr. Galbraith meets Mr. Griswold just as he would any other nice young man; and Charlotte Farnham, who recognized the robber even when he was disguised as a deck-hand, sees Mr. Griswold pretty nearly every day."

Raymer nodded. Though he would not have admitted it under torture, the entire matter figured somewhat as a mountain constructed out of a rather small mole-hill to a man for whom the subtleties lay in a region unexplored. He wondered that the clear-minded little "social climber," as his sister called her, had ever bothered her nimble brain about such an abstruse and far-fetched question of identities.

"You said, a few minutes ago, that Griswold calls himself a Socialist. That isn't quite the word. He is a sociologist."

Miss Grierson ignored the nice distinction in names.

"Socialism goes with being poor, doesn't it?" she remarked. "Since Mr. Griswold's ship has come in, I suppose he finds it easier, and pleasanter, to be a theoretical leveller than a practical one."

"That is another thing I have never been quite able to understand," said the iron-founder. "You say his father left him poor: where did he get his money?"

"Why, don't you know?" was the innocent query. And then, with a pretty affectation of embarrassment, real or perfectly simulated: "If he hasn't told you, I mustn't."

"Of course, I don't want to pry," said Raymer, loyal again.

"I can give you a hint, and that is all. Don't you remember 'My Lady Jezebel,' the unsigned novel that made such a hit last summer?"

"Why, bless goodness, yes! Did he write that?"

"He has never admitted it in so many words. But I'll divide a little secret with you. He has been reading bits of his new book to me, and pshaw! a blind person could tell! I asked him once if he could guess how much the author of 'My Lady Jezebel' had been paid, and he said, with the most perfectly transparent carelessness: 'Oh, about a hundred thousand, I suppose.'"

"Tally!" said Raymer, laughing. "Griswold has put an even ninety thousand into my little egg-basket out at the plant. But, of course you knew that, everybody in Wahaska knows it by this time."

"Yes; I knew it."

"I'm glad it's book money," Raymer went on. "If we should happen to go smash, he won't feel the loss quite so fiercely. I have a friend over in Wisconsin; he is a laboratory professor in mechanics, and he writes books on the side. He says a book is a pure gamble. If you win, you have that much more money to throw to the dicky-birds. If you lose, you've merely drawn the usual blank."

Miss Grierson did not reply, and for a little while they were both silent. Then Raymer said:

"I wonder if McMurtry doesn't think I've dropped out on him. I guess I'd better go and see. Don't wait any longer on my motions, unless you want to, Miss Margery."

When Raymer had gone, the opportunity which Broffin had so lately craved was his. Miss Grierson was left alone on the big veranda, and he had only to step out and confront her. Instead, he got up quietly and went back through the lobby with his head down and his hands in his pockets, and the surviving bit of the dead cigar disappeared between his strong teeth and became a cud of chagrin. There had been a goal in sight, but Miss Grierson had beat him to it.

And the winner of the small handicap? For the time it took Raymer to disappear she sat perfectly still, in the attitude of one who stifles all the other senses that the listening ear may hear and strike the note of warning or of relief. A group of young people, returning from a steam-launch circuit of the upper lake, came up the steps to disperse itself with pleasant human clatterings on the veranda; but in spite of the distractions the listening ear caught the sound for which it was straining. With a deep breath-drawing that was almost a sob, Miss Grierson sprang up, stole a swift confirming glance at the empty chair behind the window hangings, and crossed the veranda to stand with one arm around a supporting pillar. And since the battle was fought and won, and the friendly pillar gave its stay and shelter, the velvety eyes filled suddenly and the ripe red lips were trembling like the lips of a frightened child.



XXIX

ALL THAT A MAN HATH

For four entire days after Margery Grierson had driven home the nail of the elemental verities in her frank criticism of the new book, and Charlotte Farnham had clinched it, Wahaska's public places saw nothing of Griswold; and Mrs. Holcomb, motherly soul, was driven to expostulate scoldingly with her second-floor front who was pushing the pen feverishly from dawn to the small hours, and evidently—in the kindly widow's phrase—burning the candle at both ends and in the middle.

Out of this candle-burning frenzy the toiler emerged in the afternoon of the fifth day, a little pallid and tremulous from the overstrain, but with a thick packet of fresh manuscript to bulge in his pocket when he made his way, blinking at the unwonted sunlight of out-of-doors, to the great house at the lake's edge.

Margery was waiting for him when he rang the bell: he guessed it gratefully, and she confirmed it.

"Of course," she said, with the bewitching little grimace which could be made to mean so much or so little. "Isn't this your afternoon? Why shouldn't I be waiting for you?" Then, with a swiftly sympathetic glance for the pale face and the tired eyes: "You've been overworking again. Let's sit out here on the porch where we can have what little air there is. There must be a storm brewing; it's positively breathless in the house."

Griswold was glad enough to acquiesce; glad and restfully happy and mildly intoxicated with her beauty and the loving rudeness with which she pushed him into the easiest of the great lounging chairs and took the sheaf of manuscript away from him, declaring that she meant to read it herself.

"It will wear you out," he objected, fishing for the denial which would give the precious fillip to the craftsman vanity.

The denial came promptly.

"Foolish!" she said; "as if anything you have written could make anybody tired!" And then, with the mocking after-touch he had come to know so well, and to look for: "Is that what you wanted me to say?"

"You are the spice of life and your name should have been Variety," he countered feebly. "But I warn you beforehand: there is a frightful lot of it. I have rewritten it from the beginning."

"So much the better," she affirmed. "You've been doling it out to me in little morsels, and I've been aching to get it all at one bite." And she began to read.

It was the first time he had had any of his own work read to him, and the experience was a pure luxury; at once the keenest and the most sensuous enjoyment he had ever known. Marvelling, as he was always moved to marvel, at her bright mind and clever wit and clear insight, he was driven to the superlatives again to find words to describe her reading. Artistically, and as with the gifted sympathy of a born actress, she seemed able to breathe the very atmosphere of the story. None of his subtle nuances were lost; there was never an emphasis misplaced. Better still, the impersonation was perfect. By turns she became himself, Joan, Fidelia, Fleming, or one of the subsidiary characters, speaking the parts, rather than reading them, with such a sure apprehension of his meaning that he could almost fancy that she was reading from his mind instead of following the manuscript.

When it was over; and he could not tell whether the interval should be measured by minutes or hours; the return to the realities—the hot afternoon, the tree-shaded veranda, the lake dimpling like a sheet of molten metal under the sun-glare—was almost painful.

"It is wonderful—simply wonderful!" he said, drawing a deep breath; and then, with a flush of honest confusion to drive away the work pallor: "Of course, you know I don't mean the story; I meant your reading of it. Hasn't any one ever told you that you have the making of a great actress in you, Margery, girl?"

"No," she said shortly; and, dismissing that phase of the subject in the single word: "Let's talk about the story. You have bettered it immensely. What made you do it?"

"I don't know; some convincement that it was all wrong and out of drawing as it stood, I suppose."

"Who gave you the convincement? Miss Farnham?"

His answer was meant to be truthful, but beauty of the intoxicating sort is the most mordant of solvents for truth in the abstract.

"No; you did."

"But she told you something," she persisted. "Otherwise, you could never have made Fidelia all over again, as you have in this rewriting."

"Maybe she did," he admitted. "But that doesn't matter. You think I have bettered the story, and I know I have. And I know where I got the inspiration to do it."

She was smiling across at him, level-eyed.

"Let me pass it back to you, dear boy," she said. "You have the making of a great novelist in you. It may take years and years, and—and I'm afraid you'll always have to be helped; but if you can only get the right kind of help...." She looked away, out across the lake where a fitful breeze was turning the molten-metal dimples into laughing wavelets. Then, with one of her sudden topic-wrenchings: "Speaking of help, reminds me. Why didn't you tell me you had gone into the foundry business with Edward Raymer?"

"Because it didn't occur to me that you would care to know, I guess," he answered unsuspectingly. "As a matter of fact, I had almost forgotten it myself."

"Was it a good investment?" she asked guilelessly.

"Yes; that is, I presume it was. I didn't think much about that part of it."

"What did you think about?"

It was just here that he awoke to the realization that he could hardly afford to give Jasper Grierson's daughter the real reason for the investment. So he prevaricated, knowing well enough that he had less than no chance in an evasive duel with her.

"Raymer had been adding to his plant, and he lacked capital," he said guardedly. "I had the money, and it was lying idle."

"Mr. Raymer didn't ask you for help?"

"No; it was my own offer."

"But he did tell you that he was in trouble?"

"Y-yes," hesitantly.

"What kind of trouble was it, Kenneth? I have the best right in the world to know."

Griswold straightened himself in his chair and the work-weariness became a thing of the past. With the fairly evident fact staring him in the face from day to day, it had never occurred to him that his friend and business partner might also be his fellow-prisoner in the house of the witcheries. The sudden convincement stung a little, the all-monopolizing selfishness of the craftsman carrying easily over into the field of sentiment. Yet it was clean friendship for Raymer, no less than for the daughter of desire, that prompted him to say:

"You can't have a right to know anything that will distress you."

"Foolish!" she chided—and this time the epithet had lost its alluring softness. "You may as well tell me. Mr. Raymer had borrowed money at poppa's bank. What was the matter? Did he have to pay it back—all at once?"

There seemed to be no further opening for evasion. "Yes; I think that was the way of it," he answered.

Arguing wholly from the newly made discovery, or postulated discovery, of Raymer's state and standing as an object of Miss Grierson's solicitude, Griswold expected something in the nature of an outburst. What he got was a transfixing glance of the passionate sort, quick with open-eyed admiration.

"And you just tossed your money into the breach as if you had millions of it, and by now you've almost forgotten that you did it!" she exclaimed. "Kenneth, dear, there are times when you are so heavenly good that I can hardly believe it. Are there any more men like you over on your side of the world?"

At another time he might have smiled at the boyish frankness of the question. But it was a better motive than the analyst's that prompted his answer.

"Plenty of them, Margery, girl; too many for the good of the race. You mustn't try to make a hero out of me. Once in a while I get a glimpse of the real Kenneth Griswold—you are giving me one just now—and it's sickening. For a moment I was meanly jealous; jealous of Raymer. It was only the writing part of me, I hope, but——"

He stopped because she had suddenly turned her back on him and was looking out over the lake again. When she spoke, she went back to the business affair.

"When you invest money you ought to look after it," she said magisterially. "You are a Socialist, aren't you? How do you know that your money isn't being used to oppress somebody?"

"Oh, I do know that much," was the investor's protest. "Raymer is a good boss—too good for the crowd he is trying to brother, I'm afraid."

"What makes you say that?"

"A word or two that he has dropped, now and then. When he branched out, he had to increase his force accordingly. Some of the new men seem inclined to make trouble."

Again she fell silent, and he saw the brooding look come into the dark eyes. It was evident that something he had said had started a train of thought—and the thoughts were not altogether pleasant ones. Analyzing again, he fancied he could picture the inward struggle to break away from the unpleasantnesses, and he shook hands enthusiastically with his own gift of insight when she looked up suddenly and said: "See! the breeze is freshening out on the water. You are fagged and tired and needing a bracer. Let's go and do a turn on the lake in the Clytie."

From where he was sitting Griswold could see the trim little catboat, resplendent in polished brass and mahogany, riding at its buoy beyond the lawn landing-stage. He cared little for the water, but the invitation pointed to a delightful prolongation of the basking process which had come to be one of the chief luxuries of the Mereside afternoons.

"I'm not much of a sailor," he began; but she cut him off.

"You'll do to pull and haul. Wait for me; I'll be ready in less time than it would take another woman—Fidelia, for example—to make up her mind what she wanted to wear."

He waited; and when she came down, a few minutes later, crisply boyish in the nattiest of yachting costumes, he wondered how she could appear in so many different characters, fitting each in succession and contriving always to make the latest transformation, while it lasted, the one in which she figured as the most enticingly adorable.

"Did you look in the glass before you came down?" he asked, standing up to get the artistic effect of the shapely little figure backgrounded against the dull reds of the house wall.

"Naturally," she laughed. "Why, please? Is my face dirty?"

He ignored the flippancy.

"If you did, I don't need to tell you how irresistibly dazzling you are."

"Why shouldn't you, if you feel like it? Of course, I'd know you didn't mean it. If you were describing me to somebody else, or in the book, you'd say, 'Um, yes; rather fetching; pretty enough to—' But we all like to be sugared a little now and then; and there's one thing you must always remember: a woman's dressing-glass can't talk. Are you ready? Open the window screen and drop the manuscript inside. It will be safe until we come back, and the Clytie might be tempted to throw cold water on it if we should take it along. She's a wet little boat in a sea."

This for the outsetting: light-hearted badinage, a fair summer afternoon, a zephyrish breeze coming in tiny cat's-paws out of the north-west, and a cloudless sky. At the landing-stage Griswold made himself useful, paying out the sea-line of the movable mooring buoy and hauling on the shore-line until the handsome little craft lay at their feet. Strictly under orders he made sail on the little ship, and when the captain had taken her place at the tiller he shoved off.

For a little time the breeze was lightly baffling, and Griswold confessed that if he had been at the helm they would have gone ingloriously aground. But the small person in the correct yachting costume was an adept in boat handling, as she seemed to be in everything else; and when the sandy bottom was fairly yellowing under the Clytie's counter, there was a quick juggling of the tiller, a deft haul at the sheet, and the big main-sail filled slowly to the rippling song of the little seas splitting themselves upon the catboat's sharp cut-water.

Once clear of the shallow bay, the helmswoman laid the course up the lake; and Griswold, luxuriously lazy now that the working strain was off, stretched himself comfortably on the cockpit cushions which he had rummaged out of the cuddy cabin, and asked permission to light his pipe. The permission given and the pipe filled and lighted, he pillowed his head in his clasped hands and a great contentment, flowing into all the interstices and levelling all the inequalities, lapped him in its soothing flood. When the pipe had gone out there was joy enough left in the pure relaxation; in that and in the contemplation through half-closed eyelids of the pretty picture made by the tiller maiden braced in the stern-sheets, her shining hair breeze-blown and flying free under the captivating little yachting hat, and her eyes dancing....

Under such conditions a reflective analyst might conceivably wrench the switch aside in front of the jogging train of thought to send it down a shaded street to the lake-fronting house framed in shrubbery; to the house and to the serene young house-mistress who had voluntarily stepped from her goddess pedestal to become a flesh-and-blood woman to be loved and cherished. He knew that Charlotte Farnham's readjustment of their relations had in no wise modified her opinion of the Joans, or of the men who were weak enough or besotted enough to be taken in the nets of beguiling.... What would she think of him if she could see him lying at Margery Grierson's feet, frankly and joyously revelling in the triumphantly human charm of one of the Joans, and wishing with all his heart—for the time being, at least—that there were no such things in a world of effort as the higher ideals or any shackling requirement to live up to them?

He was still playing whimsically with the query when he was made to realize that the murmuring rush of water under the catboat's forefoot had changed into a series of resounding thumps; that the wind was rising, and that the summer afternoon sky had become suddenly overcast. The pretty tiller maiden was pushing the helm down with her foot and hauling in briskly on the sheet when he sat up.

"What's this we're coming to?" he asked, thinking less of the changed weather conditions than of the charming picture she made in action.

"Weather," she said shortly. "Look behind you."

He looked and saw a huge storm cloud rising out of the north-west and spreading like a great gray dust curtain from horizon to zenith. With the sun blotted out, a brazen light filled all the upper air, and in the heart of the cloud fleecy masses of vapor were writhing and twisting like formless giants in battle.

Quickly he measured the hazards. The Clytie was fairly in mid-lake, with plenty of sea room to leeward. There was an intervening island to shut off the down-lake view, but though its forested bluffs and abrupt headland were uncomfortably close at hand, a bit of skilful manoeuvring would put it to windward. Beyond the island he could see the breeze-blown smoke trail of the summer-resort hotel's steam launch evidently making for its home port at full speed.

"There's a good bunch of wind in that cloud," he said, springing to help his companion with the slatting main-sail. "Hadn't we better lie up under the island and let it blow over?"

"No," she snapped. "We'll have to reef, and be quick about it. Help me!"

He helped with the reefing, and the great main-sail had been successfully reduced to its smallest area and hoisted home again before the trees on the western shore began to bow and churn in the precursor blasts of the coming storm.

"It will hit us in less than a minute: how about weathering that island?" he asked.

"We've got to weather it," was the instant decision; "we can't go around." Then, the catboat still hanging in the wind's eye: "Help me get her over."

Together they held the shortened sail off at an angle, and slowly, very slowly, the boat's bow fell off toward the island. Griswold was enough of a sailor to know that it was the thing to do, but there was a perilously narrow margin. The storm squall was already tearing across from the western shore, blackening the water ahead of it and picking up a small tidal wave as it came. If it should strike them before they were ready for it, it meant one of two things: a capsize, or an instant driving of the catboat upon the hazard of the island head.

The crisis was upon them almost as soon as its threat could be measured. Of the two, it was the young woman who met it with skilful purpose. While the man could only scramble, choked and half-blinded, to windward to throw his weight on the careening gunwale, the helmswoman had pounced upon the tiller and was standing knee-deep in the water pouring over the submerged lee rail to pay out and steer and miss the island headland by a shearing hand's-breadth.

The worst was over in a moment, and under the lee of the small island there was a brief respite for pumping and bailing. The girl's black eyes were shining with excitement and fearless daring, and Griswold would have given much for time and leisure in which to catch and fix the fleeting inspiration of the instant. But there was little space for the artistic appreciation.

"Hurry!" she cried; "we'll have to take it again in a minute or two!" and there was still a bucketing of the shipped sea to thrash about in the cockpit when the island withdrew its friendly shelter and the Clytie, going free and sailed as Griswold had never seen a catboat sailed before, wallowed out into the smother.

For a little time there was not much to choose between drowning and being hammered to death by the leaping plunges and alightings of the frail cockle-shell which seemed to be blown bodily from crest to crest of the short, high-pitched seas. The wind, heavily rain-laden, came in furious gusts, flattening the reefed canvas until the bunt of the sail dragged in the trough. Griswold climbed high on the weather rail, leaning far out to help hold the balance between the heaving seas and the pounding blasts. In the momentary lulls he had flitting glimpses of the far-away town shore, with the storm-torn waste of waters intervening. With the wind veering more and more to the west, it was a fair run to the shelter of the home bay. But Margery was laying the course far to the right, though to do it she was holding the catboat cockpit-deep in the smother and taking the chance of a capsize with every recurring gust. Griswold edged his way aft as far as he dared.

"Hadn't you better let her fall off a little more and run for it?" he suggested, and he had to shout it into the pink ear nearest to him to make himself heard above the roaring of the wind and the crashing plunges of the boat.

She shook her head and made an impatient little gesture with her elbow toward the storm-lashed raceway over the bows. Griswold winked the spray out of his eyes and looked. At first he saw nothing but the wild waste of whitecaps, but at the next attempt he made out the hotel steam launch, half-way to the entrance of the southern bay and a little to leeward of the Clytie's course. The small steamer was evidently no sea-boat, and with more courage than seamanship, its steersman was driving straight for the Inn bay without regard for the direction of the wind and the seas.

"That's Ole Halverson!" cried the tiller maiden with scorn in her voice. "He thinks because he happens to have a steam engine he needn't look to see which way the wind is blowing."

"She's pitching pretty badly," Griswold called back. "If he only had sense enough to ease off a little...." Suddenly he became aware of the finer heroism of his companion. He knew now why she had refused to take shelter under the lee of the island, and why she was holding the catboat down to the edge of peril to keep the windward advantage of the laboring steamer. "Margery, girl, you're a darling!" he shouted. "Take all the chances you want to and I'm with you, if we go to the bottom!"

She nodded complete intelligence and took in another inch of the straining main-sheet.

"If Halverson loses his nerve they're going to need help, and need it before the Osprey can get out to them," she prophesied.

Griswold looked again, this time over the catboat's counter, and saw a big schooner, close-reefed, hauling out from a little bay on the north shore. The launch's plight had evidently impressed others with the necessity of doing something. The need was sufficiently urgent. Once again the Swedish man of machinery in charge of the craft in peril was inching his helm up in a vain endeavor to hold the course, and the little steamer was rolling almost funnel under. Griswold forgot that his companion was a woman and swore rabidly.

"Look at the fool!" he yelled. "He's trying to come about! If he gets into the trough——"

The thing was done almost as he spoke. A wilder squall than any of the preceding ones caught the upper works of the launch and heeled her spitefully. At the critical instant the steersman lost his head and spun the wheel, and it was all over. With a heaving plunge and a muffled explosion the launch was gone.

Once again Griswold was given to see the stuff Margery Grierson was made of in the finer warp and woof of her.

"That's for us," she said calmly; and then: "Help me get another inch or two on this sheet. We don't want to let those people on the Osprey do all of the heroic things."

Together they held the catboat down to its work, sending it ripping through the crested waves and fighting sturdily for every foot of the precious windward advantage. None the less, it was the big schooner, thrashing down the wind with every square yard of its reefed canvas drawing, which was first at the scene of disaster. Through the rain and spume they could see the schooner's crew picking up the shipwrecked passengers, who were clinging to life-belts, broken bulkheads, and anything that would float. So swiftly was the rescue effected that the rescuer had luffed and filled and was tearing on its way down the lake again when the close-hauled Clytie came up with the first of the floating wreckage. The tiller maiden's dark eyes were shining again, but this time their brightness was of tears.

"Oh, boy, boy!" she cried, with a little heart-broken catch in her voice; "some of them must have gone down with her! Can you believe that the Osprey got them all?" And then, with the sweet lips trembling: "I did my best, Kenneth; my very best: and—it wasn't—good enough!"

She was putting the catboat up into the wind, and Griswold stumbled forward to get the broader outlook. Suddenly he called back to her.

"Port!—port your helm hard! there's a man in a life-belt—he's just out of reach. Hold her there—steady—steady!" He had thrown himself flat, face down, on the half-deck forward and was clutching at something in the heaving seas. "I've got him!" he cried, and a moment later he was working his way aft, holding the man's face out of water.

It asked for their united strength to get the gray-haired, heavy-bodied victim of the capsize over the Clytie's rail. They had to bring the life-belt too; the old man's fingers were sunk into it with a dying grip that could not be broken. At first Griswold was too much preoccupied and shocked to recognize the drawn face with its hard-lined mouth and long upper lip. When he did recognize it the gripping fear was at his heart—the fear that makes a cruel coward of the hunted thing in all nature.

What might have happened if he had been alone; if Margery, taking her place at the tiller and busying herself swiftly in getting the catboat under way again, had not been looking on; he dared not think. And that other frightful thought he put away, fighting against it madly as a condemned man might push the cup of hemlock from his lips. Forcibly breaking the drowned one's hold upon the life-belt, he fell to work energetically, resorting to the first-aid expedients for the reviving of the drowned as he had learned them in his boyhood. Once, only, he flung a word over his shoulder at Margery as he fought for the old man's life. "Make for the nearest landing where we can get a doctor!" he commanded; and then, in a passion of gratitude: "O God, I thank thee that I am not a murderer!—he's coming back! he's breathing again!"

A little later he was able to leave off the first-aid arm-pumpings and chest-pressings; to straighten the limp and sprawling limbs, and to dive into the cuddy cabin, under Margery's directions, for blankets and rugs. When all was done that could be done, and he had propped the blanket-swathed body with the cushions so that the crash and plunge of the pitching catboat would be minimized for the sufferer, he went aft to sit beside the helmswoman, who was getting the final wave-leap of speed out of the little vessel.

"He is alive?" she asked.

"Yes; and that is about all that can be said. He isn't drowned; but he is old, and the shock has gone pretty near to snapping the thread."

"Of course, you remember him?" she said, looking away across the leaping waters.

Griswold, with his heart on fire with generous emotions, felt the cold hand gripping him again.

"He is the old gentleman you introduced me to at the Inn the other day: Galbraith; is that the name?"

"Yes," she rejoined, still looking away; "that is the name."

Griswold fell silent for the time; but a little later, when the catboat was rushing in long plunges through the entrance to the Wahaskan arm of the lake, he said: "You are going to take him to Mereside?"

"Yes. He is a friend of poppa's. And, anyway, it's the nearest place, and you said there was no time to lose."

There were anxious watchers on the Mereside landing-stage: the gardener, the stable-man, Thorsen, and three or four others. When the landing was safely made, Miss Grierson took command and issued her orders briskly.

"Four of you carry Mr. Galbraith up to the house, and you, Thorsen, put Baldur into the two-wheeled trap and be ready to go for Doctor Farnham when I tell you where you can find him. Johnnie Fergus, you come here and take care of the Clytie; you know how to furl down and moor her."

Griswold helped the bearers lift the blanketed figure out of the Clytie's cockpit, and while he was doing it, the steel-gray eyes of the rescued one opened slowly to fix a stony gaze upon the face of the man who was bending over him. What the thin lips were muttering Griswold heard, and so did one other. "So it's you, is it, ye murdering blue-eyed deevil?" And then: "Eh, man, man, but I'm sick!"

Griswold walked with Margery at the tail of the little procession as it wound its way up the path to the great house.

"You heard what he said?" he inquired craftily.

"Yes: he is out of his head, and no wonder," she said soberly. Then: "You must go home and change at once; you are drenched to the skin. Don't wait to come in. I'll take care of your manuscript."



XXX

THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES

The cyclonic summer storm had blown itself out, and the clouds were beginning to break away in the west, when Griswold, obeying Margery's urging to go home and change his clothes, turned his back upon Mereside and his face toward a future of thickening doubts and unnerving possibilities.

Once more he found himself wrestling with the keeper of the gate, the angel of the flaming sword set to drive him forth among the outcasts. One by one the confidently imagined safeguards were crumbling. He had been traced to Wahaska—so much could be read between the lines of Charlotte Farnham's story; if Margery's newsboy protege was to be believed, he was watched and followed. And now, after having successfully passed the ordeal of a face-to-face meeting and hand-shaking with Andrew Galbraith, chance or destiny or the powers of darkness had intervened, and a danger met and vanquished had been suddenly brought to life again, armed and menacing.

Griswold had not deceived himself, nor had he allowed Margery's apparent convincement to deceive him. The old man's mind had not been wandering in the eye-opening moment of consciousness regained. On the contrary, what he had failed to do under ordinary and conventional conditions had become instantly possible when the plunge into the dark shadow had brushed away all the artificial becloudings of the memory page. What action he would take when he should recover was as easy to prefigure as it was, for the present at least, a matter negligible. The dismaying thing was that the broad earth seemed too narrow to hide in; that invention itself became the clumsiest of blunderers when, it was given the simple task of losing a single individual among the millions of unrelated human atoms.

Thus the threat of the peril which might be called the physical. But beyond this there was another, and, for a man of temperament, a still more ominous foreshadowing of evil to come. Of some subtle, deep-seated change in himself he had long been conscious. Again and again it had manifested itself in those moments of craven fear and ruthless, murderous promptings, when kindliness, gratitude, love, all the humanizing motives, had turned suddenly to frenzied hatred, and the primitive savage had leaped up, fiercely raging with the blood-lust.

Here, again, he suffered loss, and was conscious of it. The point of view was changed, and still changing. Something, a thing indefinable, but none the less real, had gone out of him. Once, in the heart of a thick darkness of squalor and misery, he had seen a great light and the name of it was love for his kind. But now the light was waning, and in its room a bale-fire was beckoning. There be those, fat, well-nurtured, and complacent souls faring ever along the main-travelled roads of life, who need no guiding lamp and will never see the glimmer of the bale-fires. But the breaker of traditions was of those who, having once seen the light, must follow where it leads or violate a primal law of being. Some vague sense of this was stirring the dying embers for the proletary as he was climbing the hill to the street of quiet entrances; but he pushed the saving thought aside and chose to call it fanaticism. He had drawn the line and he would hew to it.

For a long time after he had reached his room, and had had his bath and change, Griswold sat at his writing-table with his head in his hands, thinking in monotonous circles. As in those other stressful moments, the importunate devil was at his ear; now mocking him for not having left the drowned enemy as he was; now whispering the dreadful hope that age and the shock and the drowning might still re-erect the barrier of safety. The eyes of the recusant grew hot and a loathsome fever ran sluggishly through his veins when he realized the depths to which he had descended; that he, once the brother-loving, could coldly weigh the chance of life and death for another and be unable to find in any corner of his heart the hope that life might prevail.

He was still sitting, miserably reflective, in the dark, when Mrs. Holcomb came up to call him to dinner. What excuse he made he could not remember two minutes after she had gone down. But to make a fourth with the motherly widow and her two bank clerks at the cheerful dinner-table was a thing beyond him. Somewhat later he heard the two young men come upstairs, and, still further along, go down again. They were social souls, his two fellow lodgers; kindly young fellows with boyish faces and honest eyes: Griswold wondered if they would still look up to him and defer to him as the older man of broader culture if they could know....