and the child with the roguish smile was unmistakable. She might
on occasion present the same smiling countenance, though in unguarded
moments a tense, worried look came into her face, and she continued her
anxious survey of her neighbors.

It was a dispiriting thought that there under his eyes, so close that
the babble of the children occasionally reached him across the
intervening tables, was the family of the man he had shot.

Their ignorance of that dark transaction gave him little comfort, nor
was there any extenuation of his sin in the fact that the wife had fled
to escape from her husband's brutality. He tried to console himself with
the reflection that the thing had a ludicrous side. He might walk over
to Mrs. Congdon and say: "Pardon me, madam, but it may interest you to
know that I shot your husband at Bailey Harbor and you have nothing
further to fear from him. I am unable to state at the moment whether the
wound was a mortal one, but from my knowledge of your family affairs I
judge that you would hardly be grieved if you never saw him again."

He was shocked at his own levity. The thing was not in any aspect a
laughing matter. Amid other experiences he had freed himself for a few
days of the thought of Putney Congdon lying dead in a lonely cleft of
the Maine rocks, but meeting the man's family in this fashion was almost
as disconcerting as a visit from Congdon's ghost.

The Congdons had eaten their meal hurriedly and were already paying
their check. He watched them move away toward the interior of the park,
marked their direction and chose a parallel course with a view to
keeping them in sight.

Occasionally he caught glimpses of the children dancing ahead of their
mother. The remote paths she chose for the ramble confirmed his
suspicion that she was on guard against the threatened seizure of the
youngsters by their father, and having been driven from Bailey Harbor
was now in town to formulate her plans for the future, or perhaps only
whiling away the hours until she could escape to some other place in the
country. Unable to argue himself out of a feeling that Mrs. Congdon's
troubles were no affair of his he was beset by the fear that he might be
doomed for the rest of his life to follow them, to view them from afar
off, never speaking to them, but led on by the guilty knowledge that he
was a dark factor in their lives.

He became so engrossed that he lost track of them for a time; then a
turn of the