er, in response to that
signal-tapping, heard nothing from within, except a monotone of voice
that came from the outer room. For half an hour he waited, repeating the
signals at intervals. At last a door opened, and Nada stood silhouetted
against the light of the room beyond.

McKay tapped again, very lightly, and the door closed quickly behind the
girl. In a moment she was at the window, which was raised a little from
the bottom.

"Mister--Roger--" she whispered. "Is it--YOU?"

"Yes," he said, finding a little hand in the darkness. "It's me."

The hand was cold, and its fingers clung tightly to his, as if the girl
was frightened. Peter, restless with waiting, had come up quietly in
the dark, and he heard the low, trembling whisper of Nada's voice at
the window. There was something in the note of it, and in the caution
of Jolly Roger's reply, that held him stiff and attentive, his ears
wide-open for approaching sound. For several minutes he stood thus, and
then the whispering voices at the window ceased and he heard his master
retreating very quietly through the night. When Jolly Roger spoke to
him, back under the broken shoulder of the ridge, he did not know that
Peter had stood near the window.

McKay stood looking back at the pale glow of light in the cabin.

"Something happened there tonight--something she wouldn't tell me
about," he said, speaking half to Peter and half to himself. "I could
FEEL it. I wish I could have seen her face."

He set out over the plain; and then, as if remembering that he must
explain the matter to Peter, he said:

"She can't get out tonight, Pied-Bot, but she'll come to us in the
jackpines tomorrow afternoon. We'll have to wait."

He tried to say the thing cheerfully, but between this night and
tomorrow afternoon seemed an interminable time, now that he was
determined to make a clean breast of his affairs to Nada, and leave the
country. Most of that night he walked in the coolness of the moonlit
plain, and for a long time he sat amid the flower-scented shadows of
the trysting-place in the heart of the jackpine clump, where Nada had
a hidden place all her own. It was here that Peter discovered something
which Jolly Roger could not see in the deep shadows, a bundle warm and
soft and sweet with the presence of Nada herself. It was hidden under a
clump of young banksians, very carefully hidden, and tucked about with
grass and evergreen boughs. When McKay left the jackpines he wonder