y nude woman standing there, and some display of will power on
the girl's part was called for before she approached nearer and
stifled the first breath of apprehension. Then, delighted by the vague
beauty of the scene, with senses soothed by the soft plash of the
cascade, she decided to walk around the lake to the spot where
Trenholme must have been hidden when he painted that astonishingly
vivid picture. Its bold treatment and simplicity of note rendered it
an easy subject to carry in the mind's eye, and Sylvia thought it
would be rather nice to conjure up the same effect in the prevailing
conditions of semi-darkness and mystery. She need not risk tearing her
dress among the briers which clung to the hillside. Knowing every inch
of the ground, she could follow the shore of the lake until nearly
opposite the statue, and then climb a few feet among the bushes at a
point where a zigzag path, seldom used and nearly obliterated by
undergrowth, led to the clump of cedars.

She was still speeding along the farther bank when a man's form loomed
in sight in the park, and her heart throbbed tumultuously with a new
and real terror. Who could it be? Had some one seen her leaving the
house? That was the explanation she hoped for at first, but her breath
came in sharp gusts and her breast heaved when she remembered how one
deadly intruder at least had broken into that quiet haven during the
early hours of the past day.

Whoever the oncomer might prove to be, he was losing no time, and he
was yet some twenty yards or more away from the statue--itself
separated from Sylvia by about the same width of water--when she
recognized, with a sigh of relief, the somewhat cumbrous form and
grampus-like puffing of Robert Fenley.

Evidently he was rather blear-eyed, since he seemed to mistake the
white marble Aphrodite for a girl in a black dress; or perhaps he
assumed that Sylvia was there, and thought he would see her at any
moment.

"I say, Sylvia!" he cried. "I say, old girl, what the deuce are you
doin'--in the park--at this time o' night?"

The words were clear enough, but there was a suspicious thickness in
the voice. Robert had been drinking, and Sylvia had learned already to
abhor and shun a man under the influence of intoxicants more than
anything else in the wide world. She did not fear her "cousin." For
years she had tolerated him, and that day she had come to dislike him
actively, but she had not the least intention of entering