t he was going to say, Alec
Trenholme sat pondering the problem of this girl's disappearance with
more mental energy than he had before given to it. Knowing the place
now, he knew that what Bates and Saul had averred was true--that there
were but two ways by which any one could leave it while water was
unfrozen, one by the boat, and the other by striking at random across
the hill to the back of the farm--a route that could only lead either to
one of several isolated farms, or, by a forty-mile tramp round by the
nearest river bridge, to the railway. At no farmhouse had she been seen,
and the journey by the bridge was too long to have been accomplished
before the snow storm must have impeded her. It was in attempting this
journey, Bates was convinced, that she had perished. There was, of
course, another possibility that had been mooted at Turrifs Settlement;
but the testimony of Bates and Saul, agreeing in the main points, had
entirely silenced it. Trenholme, thinking of this now, longed to
question more nearly, yet hardly dared.

"Do you think she could have gone mad? People sometimes do go stark mad
suddenly. Because, if so, and if you could be mistaken in thinking you
saw her in the house when you went--"

The Scotchman was looking keenly at him with sharp eyes and haggard
face. "I understand ye," he said, with a sigh of resignation, "the noise
o' the thing has been such that there's no evil men haven't thought of
me, or madness of her. Ye think the living creature ye saw rise from the
coffin was, maybe, the dead man's daughter?"

"I think it was much too big for a woman."

"Oh, as to that, she was a good height." Perhaps, with involuntary
thought of what might have been, he drew himself up to his full stature
as he said, "A grand height for a woman; but as to this idea of yours,
I'll not say ye're insulting her by it, though! that's true too; but
I've had the same notion; and now I'll tell ye something. She was not
mad; she took clothes; she left everything in order. Was that the act of
a maniac? and if she wasn't mad, clean out of her wits, would she have
done such a thing as ye're thinking of?"

"No"--thoughtfully--"I should think not."

"And, furthermore; if she had wished to do it, where is it she could
have laid him? D'ye think I haven't looked the ground over? There's no
place where she could have buried him, and to take him to the lake was
beyond her strength." There was nothing of the everyday irascibili