of a path.
It was hard to trace, but this was ground that Neil knew, a favourite
haunt of his, though few other boys ventured to trespass here. The woods
were part of the Everard estate.

Neil had found his first May flowers here on the first spring that he
was privileged to give them to Judith. Last year she had helped him look
for them here. His errand here was not so pleasant to-day. The brown
path did not really lead to the heart of the woods as it seemed to. It
was not so long as it looked. It was a fairly direct short cut to the
Everard house.

The boy followed it quickly, with no eyes for the dim lure of the woods
to-day.

"You've beat me," he muttered once to himself; "I'll have a look at
you."

Soon the woods were not so thick. They fell away around him, carelessly
thinned at first, littered with fallen trees and stumps, but nearer the
house combed out accurately by the relentless processes of landscape
gardening, and looking orderly and empty. The little path vanished
entirely here. Ahead of Neil, through a thin fringe of trees, was the
Colonel's rose garden; beyond it, the broad stretch of lawn and the
house, bulky and towered and tall.

Neil broke through the trees and stood and looked at it, straight ahead,
seen through the frame of the trellised entrance to the garden,
upstanding and ugly and arrogant.

"You've beat me," he said to the Colonel's house. "You've beat me; you
and him. I hate you!"

His voice had a hollow sound in the empty garden. Garden and lawn and
house had the same look that the whole deserted town had caught to-day;
the look of suddenly empty rooms where much life has been, a breathless
strangeness that holds echoes of what has happened there, and even hints
of what is to happen; haunted rooms. It is not best to linger there.
Neil turned uneasily toward the path again.

He turned, then he turned back, stood for a tense minute listening, then
broke through the rose garden and began to run across the lawn. Very
faint and small, so that he could not tell whether it was in a man's
voice or a woman's, but echoing clearly across the deserted garden, he
had heard a scream from the house.

It came from the house somewhere, though as Neil ran toward it the house
still looked tenantless. The veranda was without its usual gay litter of
cushions and books and serving trays. At the long windows that opened on
it all the curtains were close drawn--or at all but one.

As Neil reached the