The clock chimed. A pealing voice beat out into the night: "Masks off!" A hundred voices swelled the cry; it was drowned in waves of laughter. It rose again tumultuously: "_Masks off! Masks off!_" Nearer came hateful voices, too, that cried: "_Ellinor! Ellinor! Where are you?_" "I must go!" said Jeff. "They'll be looking for you. No; you didn't do any of those things. You couldn't do any of those things. Good-by!" "_Ellinor! Ellinor Hoffman!! Where are you?_" Miss Hoffman whipped off her mask. From the open window a shaft of light fell on her face. It was flushed, sparkling, radiant. "Masks off!" she said. "Stupid!... Oh, you great goose! Of course I did!" She stepped back into the shadow. No one, as the copybook says justly, may be always wise. Conversely, the most unwise of us blunders sometimes upon the right thing to do. With a glimmer of returning intelligence Mr. Bransford laid his noseguard on the window-sill. "_Sir!_" said Ellinor then. "How dare you?" Then she turned the other cheek. "Good-by!" she whispered, and fled away to the ballroom. Mr. Bransford, in the shadows, scratched his head dubiously. "Her Christian name was Ellinor," he muttered. "Ellinor! H'm--Ellinor! Very appropriate name.... Very!... And I don't know yet where she lives!" He wandered disconsolately away to the garden wall, forgetting the discarded noseguard. CHAPTER VI THE ISLE OF ARCADY "Then the moon shone out so broad and good That the barn-fowl crowed: And the brown owl called to his mate in the wood _That a dead man lay in the road_!" --WILL WALLACE HARNEY. Arcadia's assets were the railroad, two large modern sawmills, the climate and printer's ink. The railroad found it a patch of bare ground, six miles from water; put in successively a whistling-post, a signboard, a depot, townsite papers and a water-main from the Alamo; and, when the townsite papers were confirmed, established machine shops and made the new town the division headquarters and base for northward building. The railroad then set up the sawmills, primarily to get out ties and timbers for its own lanky growth, and built a spur to bring the forest down from Rainbow to the mills. The word "down" is used advisedly. Arcadia nestled on the plain under the very eavespouts of Rainbow Range. The branch, following with slavish fidelity the lines of a twisted corkscrew, took twenty-seven miles, mostly tunnel and trestlework, to clamber to the logging camps, with a minimum grade that was purely prohibitive and a maximum that I dare not state; but there was a rise of six thousand feet in those twenty-seven miles. You can figure the average for yourself. And if the engine should run off the track at the end of her climb she would light on the very roundhouse where she took breakfast, and spoil the shingles.