they feed you in the Paris wine-shops."

"It seems rather suspicious, doesn't it?" she mused; "your sudden
sleepiness? Are you--are you used to drinking?"

"Tea," he laughed; "I'm a perfect inebriate with a teapot."

"There must be an explanation of some sort," she insisted. Then: "Can
you climb a tree?"

He got up and dusted the sand from his clothes.

"I haven't done it since I used to pick apples in my grandfather's
orchard at Batavia, but I'll try," and he left her to go in search of a
tree tall enough to serve for an outlook.

The young woman had the two kitchen utensils washed and sand-scoured by
the time he came back.

"Well?" she inquired.

"A wild and woolly wilderness," he reported; "just a trifle more of it
than you can see from here. The lake is five or six miles wide and
perhaps twice as long. There are low hills to the north and woods
everywhere."

"And no houses or anything?"

"Nothing; for all I could see, we might be the only two human beings on
the face of the earth."

"You seem to be quite cheerful about it," she retorted.

He grinned good-naturedly. "That is a matter of temperament. I'd be
grouchy enough if it would do any good. I shall lose my motor trip
through New England."

"Think--think hard!" the young woman pleaded. "Since there is no sign of
a road, we must have come in a boat; in that case we can't be very far
from Quebec. Surely there must be some one living on the shore of a lake
as big as this. We must walk until we find a house."

"We'll do anything you say," Prime agreed; and they set out together,
following the lake shore to the left, chiefly because the beach
broadened in that direction and so afforded easy walking.

A tramp of a mile northward scarcely served to change the point of view.
There was no break in the encircling forest, and at the end of the mile
they came to a deeply indented bay, where the continuing shore was in
plain view for a doubling of another mile. The search for inhabitants
seeming to promise nothing in this direction, they turned and retraced
their steps to the breakfast camp, still puzzling over the tangle of
mysteries.

"Can't you think of _any_ way of accounting for it?" the young woman
urged for the twentieth time in the puzzlings.

"I can think of a million ways--all of them blankly impossible," said
Prime. "It's simply a chaotic joke!"

The young woman shook her head. "I have lost my sense of humor," she
confessed, adding: "I shall