e active than ever before seized
him, revolt stirring stronger with each recollection of his interviews
with the people upon his list. As they walked away, Constance
appreciated that he was feeling something deeply; she too was stirred.

"They all--all I have talked to--are like that," he said to her. "They
all have lost some one upon the lakes."

In her feeling for him, she had laid her hand upon his arm; now her
fingers tightened to sudden tenseness. "What do you mean?" she asked.

"Oh, it is not definite yet--not clear!" She felt the bitterness in
his tone. "They have not any of them been able to make it wholly clear
to me. It is like a record that has been--blurred. These original
names must have been written down by my father many years ago--many,
most of those people, I think--are dead; some are nearly forgotten.
The only thing that is fully plain is that in every case my inquiries
have led me to those who have lost one, and sometimes more than one
relative upon the lakes."

Constance thrilled to a vague horror; it was not anything to which she
could give definite reason. His tone quite as much as what he said was
its cause. His experience plainly had been forcing him to bitterness
against his father; and he did not know with certainty yet that his
father was dead.

She had not found it possible to tell him that yet; now consciously she
deferred telling him until she could take him to her home and show him
what had come. The shrill whistling of the power yacht in which she
and her party had come recalled to her that all were to return to the
yacht for luncheon, and that they must be waiting for her.

"You'll lunch with us, of course," she said to Alan, "and then go back
with us to Harbor Point. It's a day's journey around the two bays; but
we've a boat here."

He assented, and they went down to the water where the white and brown
power yacht, with long, graceful lines, lay somnolently in the
sunlight. A little boat took them out over the shimmering, smooth
surface to the ship; swells from a faraway freighter swept under the
beautiful, burnished craft, causing it to roll lazily as they boarded
it. A party of nearly a dozen men and girls, with an older woman
chaperoning them, lounged under the shade of an awning over the after
deck. They greeted her gaily and looked curiously at Alan as she
introduced him.

As he returned their rather formal acknowledgments and afterward fell
into general con