At three o'clock, her suitcase in one hand, her bag and her umbrella in the other, her long cape over her arm, she ventured into the hall. It was vacant and silent. She stole silently down the stairs. She met nobody. She noiselessly opened the front door. Apparently nobody noticed her. She walked briskly down the steps; turned toward the Avenue. At the corner something impelled her to look back. Byan, his look directed downward, two fingers fumbling in his side pocket for his key, was briskly ascending the steps. III Lindsay drove directly from the Quinanog station to the Quinanog Arms. The Arms proved to be a tiny mid-Victorian hotel, not an inexact replica--and by no means a discreditable one--of many small rustic hotels that he had seen in England and France. Indeed Quinanog, as he caught it in glimpses, might have been one part of France or one part of England--that region which only the English Channel prevents from being the same country. The motor, which conducted him from the station to the Arms, drove on roads in which high wine-glass elms made Gothic arches; between wide meadowy stretches, brilliant with buttercups, daisies, iris; unassertive, well-proportioned houses with roomy vegetable plots and tiny patches here and there of flower garden. He arrived at so early an hour that the best of the long friendly day stretched before him. He felt disposed to spend it merely in reading and smoking. He had plenty to smoke; he had seen to that himself in New York. And he had plenty to read; Spink Sparrel had seen to that in Boston. The bottom of one of his trunks was covered with Lutetia Murray's works. But although he smoked a great deal, he did not read at all. Until luncheon he merely followed his impulses. Those impulses took him a little way down the main street, which ran between comfortable, white colonial houses, set back from the road. He walked through the tiny triangular Common. He visited the little, poster-hung post-office; looked into the big neatly arranged general store; strolled back again. His impulses then led him to explore the grounds of the Arms and deposited him finally in the hammock on the side porch. After a simple and very well-cooked luncheon, his languor broke into a sudden restlessness. "Where is the Murray place?" he asked of the proprietor of the Arms, whose name, the letterhead of the Arms stationery stated, was Hyde. "The Murray place!" Hyde repeated inquiringly. He was a long, noncommittal-looking person with big pale blue eyes illuminating a sandy baldness. "Oh, the _Murray_ place! You mean the old Murray place." "I mean the house, whichever and wherever it is, that Lutetia Murray, the author, used to live in." "Oh, sure! I get you. You see it's been empty for such a long spell that we forget all about it. The old Murray place is on the road to West Quinanog." "It isn't occupied, you say?"