n low
tones. "I thought I saw him once before; but this time I am certain!"

Griswold sprang from his chair and a moment later was letting himself
out noiselessly through the hall door. There was nothing stirring on the
porch. The windless night was starlit and crystal clear, and the silence
was profound. As soon as the glare of the house lights was out of his
eyes, Griswold made a quick circuit of the porch. Not satisfied with
this, he widened the circle to take in the front yard, realizing as he
did it that a dozen men might easily play hide-and-seek with a single
searcher in the shrubbery. He was still groping among the bushes, and
Miss Farnham had come to the front door, when the doctor's buggy
appeared under the street lights and was halted at the home
hitching-post.

"Hello, Mr. Griswold; is that you?" called the cheery one, when he saw a
bareheaded man beating the covers in his front yard.

Griswold met his host at the gate and walked up the path with him.

"Miss Charlotte thought she saw some one at one of the front windows,"
he explained; and a moment afterward the daughter was telling it for
herself.

"I saw him twice," she insisted; "once while we were at dinner, and
again just now. The first time I thought I might be mistaken, but this
time----"

Griswold was laughing silently and inwardly deriding his gifts when,
under cover of the doctor's return, he made decent acknowledgments for
benefits bestowed and took his departure. On the pleasant summer-night
walk to upper Shawnee Street he was congratulating himself upon the now
quite complete fulfilment of the wishing prophecy. Miss Farnham was
going to prove to be all that the most critical maker of studies from
life could ask in a model; a supremely perfect original for the
character of _Fidelia_ in the book. Moreover, she would be his
touchstone for the truths and verities; even as Margery Grierson might,
if she were forgiving enough to let by-gones be by-gones, hold the
mirror up to Nature and the pure humanities. Moreover, again, whatever
slight danger there might have been in a possibility of recognition was
a danger outlived. If the first meeting had not stirred the sleeping
memories in Miss Farnham, subsequent ones would serve only to widen the
gulf between forgetfulness and recollection by just such distances as
the Wahaskan Griswold should traverse in leaving behind him the
deck-hand of the _Belle Julie_.

Thus the complacent, musing upper tho