n amazement. "Why aren't you
at Sparrow Lake with your aunt? Get my wire? Eh? They told me you
left this morning----" His voice was hoarse and it trailed away as if
the situation embarrassed him and he was not quite sure how to handle
it. He stared uncertainly, drumming nervously with his fingers.

Phil nodded as he sat down in the nearest chair and stared back. The
surprise of finding his uncle there was overridden by the new discovery
of his evident diffidence, his flushed face, a lack of that
self-contained bearing which always had marked him as a man of large
affairs. It was his uncle's strict rule, he recalled, never to take a
second drink; it was an axiom of the Honorable Milton's that the second
drink drew the cork on indiscretion and eventual inebriety. That
something had happened which must have disturbed him greatly to make
him break this rule was a deduction as simple as the evidence that he
had broken it.

"What about you, Uncle Milt?" suggested Kendrick after a brief
explanation of his change of plans--a recital which carefully avoided
mention of McCorquodale or the mysterious woman of the fog. "If I had
known that Aunt Dolly was going to be alone I wouldn't have let Thorpe
persuade me to stay over a day."

"I was called in unexpectedly--important business----" He pushed
uneasily at the papers on the desk. "Have a cigar, Philip?" He passed
the humidor as he spoke, then scratched a match and held it to his
nephew's selection with careful courtesy. He shook his head in smiling
disapproval of the swollen eye. "Bad business, young man! Bad
business! A fine flower of folly you have there, eh? Don't grow 'm
like that at the Ladies' Aid meeting at the First Baptist Church, do
they?" He settled back in his chair, chortling.

Phil smiled as he tossed aside his hat.

"Blame it on the fog, Uncle Milt. I was foolish enough to trip over
something in the dark and take a header down the Canoe Club stairs into
the water," he explained mendaciously. "Me for the woods to-morrow
without fail. I guess I got off easy at that, for you can't see your
hand in front of your face out on the bay to-night. Stinson almost ran
me down with the launch--missed me by a couple of feet and that's all."

"Stinson? Stinson, d'you say? Don't mean _our_ Stinson--in--_our_
launch? Not our Stinson in our very own launch, Phil'p? You s'prise
me greatly. In the dark like that---- How do you know?" he challenged.