n accused you of having no insight--no intuition," she said
musingly. "Yet you have a way of groping blindly to the very heart of
things. How could you know that it has come to be the chief object of my
life to keep Mr. Wingfield from becoming interested in what you
flippantly call 'the dramatic possibilities'?"

"I didn't know it," he returned.

"Of course you didn't. Yet it is true. It is one of the reasons why I
gave up going with the Herbert Lassleys after my passage was actually
booked on the _Carania_. Cousin Janet's party was made up. Dosia and
Jerry Blacklock came down to the steamer to see us off. Dosia told me
that Mr. Wingfield was included. You have often said that I have the
courage of a man--I hadn't, then. I was horribly afraid."

"Of what?" he queried.

"Of many things. You would not understand if I should try to explain
them."

"I do understand," he hastened to say. "But you have nothing to fear.
Castle 'Cadia will merely gain an ally when Wingfield hears the story of
the little war. Besides, I was not including your father's controversy
with the Arcadia Company in the dramatic material; I was thinking more
particularly of the curious and unaccountable happenings that are
continually occurring on the work--the accidents."

"There is no connection between the two--in your mind?" she asked. She
was looking away from him, and he could not see her face. But the
question was eager, almost pathetically eager.

"Assuredly not," he denied promptly. "Otherwise----"

"Otherwise you wouldn't be here to-night as my father's guest, you would
say. But others are not as charitable. Mr. Macpherson was one of them.
He charged all the trouble to us, though he could prove nothing. He said
that if all the circumstances were made public--" She faced him quickly,
and he saw that the beautiful eyes were full of trouble. "Can't you see
what would happen--what is likely to happen if Mr. Wingfield sees fit to
make literary material out of all these mysteries?"

The Kentuckian nodded. "The unthinking, newspaper-reading public would
probably make one morsel of the accidents and your father's known
antagonism to the company. But Wingfield would be something less than a
man and a lover if he could bring himself to the point of making
literary capital out of anything that might remotely involve you or your
father."

She shook her head doubtfully.

"You don't understand the artistic temperament. It's a passion. I once
he