aken on that definiteness and
ineffaceableness of a thing which, once heard, can never again be
forgotten. But, in panic that he might forget, he wrote it, guessing
at the spelling--"_Miwaka_."

It was a name, of course; but the name of what? It repeated and
repeated itself to him, after he got back into bed, until its very
iteration made him drowsy.

Outside the gale whistled and shrieked. The wind, passing its last
resistance after its sweep across the prairies before it leaped upon
the lake, battered and clamored in its assault about the house. But as
Alan became sleepier, he heard it no longer as it rattled the windows
and howled under the eaves and over the roof, but as out on the lake,
above the roaring and ice-crunching waves, it whipped and circled with
its chill the ice-shrouded sides of struggling ships. So, with the
roar of surf and gale in his ears, he went to sleep with the sole
conscious connection in his mind between himself and these people,
among whom Benjamin Corvet's summons had brought him, the one name
"_Miwaka_."

CHAPTER VI

CONSTANCE SHERRILL

In the morning a great change had come over the lake. The wind still
blew freshly, but no longer fiercely, from the west; and now, from
before the beach beyond the drive, and from the piers and breakwaters
at the harbor mouth, and from all the western shore, the ice had
departed. Far out, a nearly indiscernible white line marked the
ice-floe where it was traveling eastward before the wind; nearer, and
with only a gleaming crystal fringe of frozen snow clinging to the
shore edge, the water sparkled, blue and dimpling, under the morning
sun; multitudes of gulls, hungry after the storm, called to one another
and circled over the breakwaters, the piers, and out over the water as
far as the eye could see; and a half mile off shore, a little work
boat--a shallop twenty feet long--was put-put-ing on some errand along
a path where twelve hours before no horsepower creatable by man could
have driven the hugest steamer.

Constance Sherrill, awakened by the sunlight reflected from the water
upon her ceiling, found nothing odd or startling in this change; it
roused her but did not surprise her. Except for the short periods of
her visits away from Chicago, she had lived all her life on the shore
of the lake: the water--wonderful, ever altering--was the first sight
each morning. As it made wilder and more grim the desolation of a
stormy day, so it