itting felt hat was slightly askew
on her head, and a once jaunty red feather that thrust up from it was
now hanging limp and dejected, broken perhaps by some low-hanging
branch she had failed to duck. She was dressed in a two-piece outing
costume of knitted wool, and she looked just now as if those garments
were too warm for comfort.

Her face brightened as she observed Varr seated on the rock, and she
came toward him promptly. He brightened, too, welcoming any human
being of tangible flesh and blood at that moment, although there was no
living person whom he habitually detested more than he did his wife's
sister, Miss October Copley. Her evident perturbation, however, gave
him an uneasy premonition that he was about to hear more of his monk.
But he left it to her to introduce the subject.

"Well, Ocky--reducing?"

"Not much!" answered the lady briefly. "_Scared_!"

She did not seat herself beside him on the bowlder, but chose instead
to drop at full length on a patch of green turf at his feet. With such
breath as remained to her she expelled a sigh of relief.

"Scared, eh? I didn't suppose there was anything on earth that could
scare you!"

She pounced instantly on his phraseology. "Perhaps not--on earth!" In
a smaller voice than she was wont to employ, she added timidly, "Simon,
d-do you believe in ghosts?"

"_Ghosts_!" He fortified himself by a glance at the cabbages. "Talk
sense, Ocky!"

"Who says it isn't sense?" snapped Miss Copley. "Anyway, I just got
the shock of my long and exciting life. See here, Simon--didn't you
come up that path a few minutes ago?"

"I did. What of it?"

"I was sure it was you ahead of me as we crossed the meadow. Tell me,
did you meet anything--I mean, any one?"

"What do you mean? Did _you_?"

"Y-yes. A figure in black--dressed something like a monk. I didn't
meet him, exactly--he dodged into the woods as I came along. That is,
I suppose he did--he just seemed to vanish!"

"Oh--he seemed to vanish, did he?" Varr shifted nervously on his
granite throne. "You say he was dressed like a monk? Did--did you see
his _face_?"

"No, I couldn't see that--"

"Ah! You couldn't, eh?" He rubbed the palms of his hands on his
handkerchief as he probed a little deeper. "Too far away, I suppose."

"No. He had on a mask."

"A _mask_!" Comprehension came to him at once, and he inwardly cursed
himself for an imaginative fool before continuing. "Well, Ocky, to