g boat-ride, I shall row alone."

She turned from him with a sigh, and he followed her dejectedly up the
path toward the club-house.

She had lost some of the fresh beauty which she had brought to the
cove, and her step was no longer elastic; but this Willock did not
notice. He gave little heed to their tones, their gestures, their
looks in which love sought a thin disguise wherein it might show itself
unnamed. He had seized on the vital fact that in the morning, Annabel
and Gledware would push off from the boat-house steps, presumably
alone; and it would be early morning. Perhaps Gledware would come
first to the boat-house, there to wait for Annabel. In that case, he
would not ride with Annabel. The lake was deep--deep as Willock's hate.

Willock passed the night in the woods, sometimes walking against time
among the hills, sometimes seated on the ground, brooding. The night
was without breath, without coolness. Occasionally he climbed a
rounded elevation from which the clubhouse was discernible. No lights
twinkled among the barren trees. All in that wilderness seemed asleep
save himself. The myriad insects that sing through the spring and
summer months had not yet found their voices; there was no trill of
frogs, not even the hooting of an owl,--no sound but his own breathing.

At break of dawn he crept into the boat-house like a shadow,
barefooted, bareheaded--the club-house was not yet awake. He looked
about the barnlike room for a hiding-place. Walls, floor, ceiling were
bare. Near the door opening on the lake was a rustic bench, impossible
as a refuge. Only in one corner, where empty boxes and a disused skiff
formed a barricade, could he hope for concealment. He glided thither,
and on the floor between the dusty wall of broad boards and the jumbled
partition, he found a man stretched on his back.

At first, he thought he had surprised a sleeper, but as the figure did
not move, he decided it must be a corpse. He would have fled but for
his need of this corner. He bent down--the man was bound hand and
foot. In the mouth, a gag was fastened. Neck and ankles were tied to
spikes in the wall.

Willock swiftly surveyed the lake and the sloping hill leading down
from the club-house. Nobody was near. As he stared at the landscape,
the front door of the club-house opened. He darted hack to the corner.
"Pardner," he said, "I got to ask your hospitality for a spell, and if
you move so as to attract at