oved at last from
where she held herself upright against the hedge, and entered the
Ocumpaugh grounds. "Will you call in to see me to-morrow?" she asked,
pausing to look back at a turn in the path. "I shall not sleep to-night
for thinking of those possible developments."

"Since you permit me," I returned; "that is, if I am still here. Affairs
may call me away at any moment."

"Yes, and so with me. Affairs may call me away also. I was to sail on
Saturday for Liverpool. Only Mrs. Ocumpaugh's distress detains me. If
the situation lightens, if we hear any good news to-night, or even early
to-morrow, I shall continue my preparations, which will take me again to
New York."

"I will call if you are at home."

She gave me a slight nod and vanished.

Why did I stand a good three minutes where she had left me, thinking,
but not getting anything from my thoughts, save that I was glad that I
had not been betrayed into speaking of the old man Miss Graham had met
on the bridge? Yet it might have been well, after all, if I had done so,
if only to discover whether Mrs. Ocumpaugh had confided this occurrence
to her most intimate friend.

IV

CHALK-MARKS

My next move was toward the bungalow. Those chalk-marks still struck me
as being worthy of investigation, and not only they, but the bungalow
itself. That certainly merited a much closer inspection than I had been
able to give it under Miss Graham's eye.

It was not quite a new place to me, nor was I so ignorant of its history
(and it had a history as I had appeared to be in my conversation with
Miss Graham). Originally it had been a stabling place for horses; and
tradition said that it had once harbored for a week the horse of General
Washington. This was when the house on the knoll above had been the seat
and home of one of our most famous Revolutionary generals. Later, as the
trees grew up around this building, it attracted the attention of a new
owner, William Ocumpaugh, the first of that name to inhabit Homewood,
and he, being a man of reserved manners and very studious habits, turned
it into what we would now call, as Miss Graham did, a den, but which he
styled a pavilion, and used as a sort of study or reading-room.

His son, who inherited it, Judge Philo Ocumpaugh, grandfather of the
present Philo, was as studious as his father, but preferred to read and
write in the quaint old library up at the house, famous for its wide
glass doors opening on to the lawn,