After an hour had passed and Moreton's clothes had dried somewhat, he was glad to accept his host's invitation to go into the Colonel's part of the house. The glimpse he had caught of this sumptuous-looking room--sumptuous as compared with the rest of the uncouth, scantily furnished house--had set him to wondering what it could mean. As he passed through the low door-way the girl sprang up from a stool in front of an easel that stood near the middle of the floor. Her face was burning with the flush of one surprised in an act of the most furtive nature. Moreton paused, feeling with quick certainty how deeply he was embarrassing her. She turned her large eyes on him with a startled, momentary stare, and letting fall a charcoal pencil, fairly ran out of the room, carrying with her what appeared to be a small block of drawing paper. On the easel was an unfinished but powerful sketch of a large pointer dog. The room was littered with evidences of artistic and literary labor and recreation. The walls were lined with books. In the corners stood guns, fishing rods and other implements of sport by flood and field. On a table was a fine microscope, a tiny crucible and a blow-pipe. A pair of slippers sat on the broad hearth, and a sober-looking dressing-gown lay across a chair. Evidently the Colonel was a man who knew how to take his ease in his inn. Moreton passed along by the book-shelves, glancing at the titles of the books, finding side by side the works of Stuart Mill and the poems of Andre Chenier, the novels of George Eliot and the rhymes of Jasmin the Troubadour, volumes of La Place, Goethe and Newton set among the stories of Thomas Hardy and William Black, whilst the poems of Longfellow and Tennyson and Keats were shoulder to shoulder with the latest fictions of Zola and Daudet. Copies of magazines and weekly literary and art journals were scattered promiscuously about in the room. "The Colonel he air a outdacious quare man," said White, who had followed Moreton into the room, "but what he don't know hit ain't wo'th a knowin', though I can't jest see what good hit's a doin' of him. S'pose hit's fun for 'im, mebbe, to set here a drawin' of picters an' a writin' an' a paintin' an' all that air sort o' doin's. But then ef he wants to, an' he pays me for the use o' my house, hit's all proper I s'pect. Then he's all over a gentleman, the Colonel air, a perfect gentleman, with a heart es big es a fodder-stack." "Does the Colonel make this his permanent home?" inquired Moreton, taking up a volume bound in old black leather, and glancing at its title page, on a space of which was written in a rather small but decidedly masculine hand, the name: John Mercer Reynolds.