now what that
cutting had meant. With her hare-and-hounds' experience in mind, Doris
had cut off other strips, perhaps half a dozen or more, and had
undoubtedly dropped them as a trail for him to pick up. Possibly he had
already unseeingly passed several. But that did not matter. He was on
the right track now. The house was on this road, but farther up.

He leaped into the car again and started back. He drove very slowly,
forcing the reluctant racer to crawl along, and sweeping every inch of
the roadside with a careful scrutiny, but he had gone more than a mile
before he found the second scent. This was another bit of the vivid
silk, dropped on a country road that turned off the main road at a sharp
angle. With a heartfelt exclamation of thanksgiving, he turned into this
bypath.

It was narrow, shallow-rutted, and apparently little used. It might stop
anywhere, it might lead nowhere. It wound through a field, a meadow, a
bit of deep wood, through which he saw the gleam of water. Then, quite
suddenly, it again widened into a real road, merging into an avenue of
trees that led in turn to the entrance of a big dark-gray house, in a
somber setting of cedars.

Laurie stopped his car and thoughtfully nodded to himself. This was the
place. He felt that he would have recognized it even without that
guiding flame of ribbon. It was so absolutely the kind of place Shaw's
melodramatic instincts would lead him to choose.

There was the look about it that clings to houses long untenanted, a
look not wholly due to its unkempt grounds and the heavy boards over its
windows. It had been without life for a long, long time, but somewhere
in it, he knew, life was stirring now. From a side chimney a thin line
of smoke curled upward. On the second floor, shutters, newly unbolted,
creaked rustily in the January wind. And, yes, there it was; outside of
one of the unshuttered windows, as if dropped there by a bird, hung a
vivid bit of ribbon.

Rather precipitately Laurie backed his car to a point where he could
turn it, and then raced back to the main road. His primitive impulse had
been to drive up to the entrance, pound the door until some one
responded, and then fiercely demand the privilege of seeing Miss Mayo.
But that, he knew, would never do. He must get rid of the car, come back
on foot, get into the house in some manner, and from that point meet
events as they occurred.

Facing this prospect, he experienced an incredible combinat