to it myself,” said Haynes, and fell into deep thought. 

 “Well?” queried the girl after waiting impatiently. “It isn’t a secret, is it?” 

 “Something in that line. I’ve just been all over the ground between the place where Mr. Colton was assailed and the beach, without finding hide or hair of the horse. It must have escaped.” 

 “I for one won’t believe that until I see it alive.” 

 Haynes glanced at her sharply. “Woman’s intuition,” he said. “I won’t either. Well, I’m going to breakfast.” 

 The girl lingered, looking out into the ruddy-golden morning. It was late September weather, a day burnished with sunlight. A faint haze softened the splendour of the knolls. The air was instinct with the rare, fine quality of the vanishing summer. It was the falling cadence of the season, one of the last few perfect, fulfilling notes of the year’s love-melody. With all the knowledge that death and horror lurked somewhere in the lovely expanse spread before her, Dolly Ravenden yearned to it. Soon she would be back amid the cosmopolitan gaieties of the Capital. She loved that too, but with a different and shallower part of her nature. Sharply it came to her that this year she would leave with a deeper regret than ever before, and the nature of that regret was formulating itself against the stern veto of her will. “A man I’ve not seen half a dozen times!” she half incredulously reproached herself. 

 A certain feminine exasperation against herself was illogically and perversely turned upon Dick Colton as he strode around the corner of the piazza. The experienced wager of love-tilts might have interpreted the expression she turned to him, and have fled the stricken field. Poor Dick was the merest novice. His attitude toward women had always been much the same as toward men, varying in degree according to the charm or quality of the individual, but all of a kind, until he had encountered Dolly Ravenden. To his unsuspecting mind it seemed that at the present moment he was in the greatest luck. The sun was shining with a special, even a personal, lustre. Abruptly it darkened several million candle-power as Miss Ravenden gave him the most casual of greetings and the curve of a shoulder while she scanned the spreading landscape. 

 “Have I done anything, Miss Dol—Miss Ravenden?” asked blundering Dick. 

 “Done anything?” repeated she with indifferent inquiry. “I’m sure I don’t know.” 

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