For the moment his mind attacked the problem with curiously little spirit; but one thing at least was instantly clear. He must return to Hunston to-night, by the first train after his arrival in New York, find Higginson and call him to his well-earned reckoning. Meantime ... here was this girl, this daughter of Uncle Elbert, whom the old sneak had for the second time failed to bend to his mean uses.... "But what reason," he said mechanically, "did he give for his rather unusual request?" "He wouldn't give any! That's what makes it all so ridiculous--don't you see? Naturally I asked, but he only said in his nervous apologetic way that he wasn't at liberty to tell, but that after last night I ought to consider whether you--your surroundings were likely to be quite safe. I said: 'But oughtn't you to give me some idea and, if there is any danger, warn Mr. Varney and Mr. Maginnis? You can't mean that there is another plot, involving the yacht this time--the likelihood of a naval battle on the Hudson?' And then he wrung his hands and said that he couldn't tell me what he meant, but that I'd certainly regret it if I came. There! Oh, I _know_ he thought he was doing somebody a kindness--you and me both, I believe! And yet--that was just a little creepy, wasn't it?" He made no answer to this; hardly heard what she said. Mr. Higginson, his works and ways, had once more slipped wholly from his mind. Something in the look of her face, its young trustfulness, its utter lack of suspicion, had already laid paralyzing hold upon him. Now a new thought possessed him; and all at once his breast was in a tumult. "And yet," he said, with sudden fierce exultation, "_you came_!" She colored slightly under his look and tone and, to cover it, gave a light laugh. "Oh, yes.. dauntless person that I am! Have you the remotest idea what he was talking about?... But oh, really we must turn around now! Indeed we must--I hadn't noticed how far we have come. And you can show me things as we go back, can't you?" He started at her speech; asked himself suddenly and wildly what was wrong with him. A better opening for his crushing announcement could not have been desired. Yet he stood dumb as a man of stone. One blurted phrase would commit him irrevocably, but his lips would not say it. And he was glad. He stared over the water thinking desperately what this might mean. In that first meeting, radiant as it had somehow seemed to him, he knew that, given this chance, he could have carried his business through without a quiver. Even last night when, he thought, things to make it harder had piled one on another like Ossa on Pelion, it would not have been impossible. Now his lips appeared sealed by a new and overwhelming reluctance; a resistless weakness saturated him through and through, seducing his will, filching away his very voice.