adies
in the hall.

Here they found a change of sentiment prevailing. Although failing in no
observance of courtesy, Mrs. Briscoe had been a little less than
complaisant toward the departed guest. This had been vaguely perceptible
to Briscoe at the time, but now she gency constrained him."

"I don't see why you should have asked him to dine," she said to her
husband. "He was difficult to persuade, and only your urgency constrained
him."

Her face was uncharacteristically petulant and anxious as she stood on
the broad hearth at one side of the massive mantelpiece, one hand lifted
to the high shelf; her red cloth gown with the amber-tinted gleams of the
lines of otter fur showed richly in the blended light of fire and lamp.
Her eyes seemed to shrink from the window, at which nevertheless she
glanced ever and anon.

"I delight in the solitude here, and I have never felt afraid, but I
think that since this disastrous raid that revenue officer is in danger
in this region from the moonshiners, and that his presence at our house
will bring enmity on us. It really makes me apprehensive. It was not
prudent to entertain him, and certainly not at all necessary--it was
almost against his will, in fact."

"Well, well, he is gone now," returned Briscoe easily, lifting the lid of
the piano and beginning to play a favorite air. But she would not quit
the subject.

"While you three were at the stable I thought I heard a step on the
veranda--you need not laugh--Lillian heard it as well as I. Then, when
you were so long coming back, I went upstairs to get a little shawl to
send out to you to put over Archie as you came across the yard--the mists
are so dank--and I saw--I am _sure_ I saw--just for a minute--a light
flicker from the hotel across the ravine."

Briscoe, his hands crashing out involuntarily a discordant chord, looked
over his shoulder with widening eyes. "Why, Gladys, there is not a soul
in the hotel now!"

"That is why the light there seemed so strange."

"Besides, you know, you _couldn't_ have seen a light for the mists."

"The mists were shifting; they rose and then closed in again. Ask
Lillian--she happened to be standing at the window there, and she said
she saw the stars for a few moments."

"_Now, now, now!_" exclaimed Briscoe remonstrantly, rising and coming
toward the hearth. "You two are trying to get up a panic, which means
that this delicious season in the mountains is at an end for us, and we
must g