rty; but when I rowed over close to her--"

"I know her," I said. "I met her in the woods yesterday."

"That explains; though I call it an infernal shame you didn't tell.
I rowed across to find out what ailed her: she stood waving her arms
so, and crying--like a child in distress. When I came near she
called on to me to stop. 'Not you,' she said, 'the little boy!
Where is the little boy?' I told her that we had a boy on board, but
that just now you were off on a cruise; and with that she turned
right about, and ran up through the woods and out of sight; but for
some way I could hear her crying and calling out just as before:
'The little boy!' it was; 'Where is the little boy?'--meaning you, I
suppose."

We were now come to the foot of the first waterfall, an obvious
_cul de sac_ for a party which included two ladies and a sick man on
a litter. I stood gazing up at the wet, slippery rocks by which I
had made my ascent yesterday, and searching in vain for a more
practicable path. Dr. Beauregard halted and turned upon me with a
smile.

"A moment," said he, "and you will grant that my privacy is rather
neatly protected. But first"--he pointed to the water pouring past
us from the pool beneath the fall--"you may remark that the stream
here has more than twice the volume of the stream you see coming down
the rocks."

I looked. The difference was plain enough, and I had been a fool in
failing to observe it.

"The reason being," he went on, "that a second and larger stream
flows into the pool under the very stones on which you are standing.
I myself laid that channel for it, almost ten years ago, and Nature
has very kindly helped to disguise it. Now, if you will follow me--"

He drew aside a mat of creepers overhanging a bush to the left of the
path, and, stooping, disappeared into a dim, green tunnel, so
artfully contrived that even without its curtain of creepers it
suggested no more than a chance gap in the undergrowth. The tunnel
zigzagged twice at a sharp angle, and then, quite suddenly, the
dimness changed to warm sunlight, and we emerged at his heels upon a
prospect that well excused my gasp of astonishment.

We stood at the lower end of a smooth, green glade, through which a
broad stream--a river, almost--came swirling, its murmur drowned in
the thunder of the waterfall behind us, which the bushes now
concealed. The glade was, in fact, a valley-bottom, thinned of
undergrowth and set with tall trees