the laughter undeceived her.

But the next morning Joan repeated the story with additional and
convincing detail.

"Sounds of whining and growling woke me," she said, "and I distinctly
heard sniffing under my tent, and the scratching of paws."

"Oh, Timothy! Can it be a porcupine?" exclaimed the Bo'sun's Mate with
distress, forgetting that Sweden was not Canada.

But the girl's voice had sounded to me in quite another key, and looking
up I saw that her father and Sangree were staring at her hard. They,
too, understood that she was in earnest, and had been struck by the
serious note in her voice.

"Rubbish, Joan! You are always dreaming something or other wild," her
father said a little impatiently.

"There's not an animal of any size on the whole island," added Sangree
with a puzzled expression. He never took his eyes from her face.

"But there's nothing to prevent one swimming over," I put in briskly,
for somehow a sense of uneasiness that was not pleasant had woven itself
into the talk and pauses. "A deer, for instance, might easily land in
the night and take a look round--"

"Or a bear!" gasped the Bo'sun's Mate, with a look so portentous that we
all welcomed the laugh.

But Joan did not laugh. Instead, she sprang up and called to us to
follow.

"There," she said, pointing to the ground by her tent on the side farthest
from her mother's; "there are the marks close to my head. You can
see for yourselves."

We saw plainly. The moss and lichen--for earth there was hardly any--had
been scratched up by paws. An animal about the size of a large dog it
must have been, to judge by the marks. We stood and stared in a row.

"Close to my head," repeated the girl, looking round at us. Her face, I
noticed, was very pale, and her lip seemed to quiver for an instant.
Then she gave a sudden gulp--and burst into a flood of tears.

The whole thing had come about in the brief space of a few minutes, and
with a curious sense of inevitableness, moreover, as though it had all
been carefully planned from all time and nothing could have stopped it.
It had all been rehearsed before--had actually happened before, as the
strange feeling sometimes has it; it seemed like the opening movement in
some ominous drama, and that I knew exactly what would happen next.
Something of great moment was impending.

For this sinister sensation of coming disaster made itself felt from the
very beginning, and an atmosphere of gloom and dismay