"Mr. Hartridge, I am sorry that I must believe that heretofore you have been known as Holbrook. The fact was clenched for me this afternoon, quite late, as I stood in the path below here. I heard quite distinctly a young woman call you father." "So? Then you're an eavesdropper as well as a trespasser!"--and the man laughed. "We will admit that I am both," I flared angrily. "You are considerate, Mr. Donovan!" "The young woman who called you father and whom you answered from the deck of the house-boat is a person I know." "The devil!" He calmly puffed his pipe, holding the bowl in his fingers, his idle hand thrust into his trousers pocket. "It was Miss Helen Holbrook that I saw here, Mr. Hartridge." He started, then recovered himself and peered into the pipe bowl for a second; then looked at me with an amused smile on his face. "You certainly have a wonderful imagination. The person you saw, if you saw any one on your visit to these premises to-day, was my daughter, Rosalind Hartridge. Where do you think you knew her, Mr. Donovan?" "I saw her this morning, at St. Agatha's School. I not only saw her, but I talked with her, and I am neither deaf nor blind." He pursed his lips and studied me, with his head slightly tilted to one side, in a cool fashion that I did not like. "Rather an odd place to have met this Miss--what name, did you say?--Miss Helen Holbrook;--a closed school-house, and that sort of thing." "You may ease your mind on that point; she was with your sister, her aunt, Mr. Holbrook; and I want you to understand that your following Miss Patricia Holbrook here is infamous and that I have no other business but to protect her from you." He bent his eyes upon me gravely and nodded several times. "Mr. Donovan," he began, "I repeat that I am not Henry Holbrook, and my daughter--is my daughter, and not your Miss Helen Holbrook. Moreover, if you will go to Tippecanoe or to Annandale and ask about me you will learn that I have long been a resident of this community, working at my trade, that of a canoe-maker. That shop down there by the creek and this house, I built myself." "But the girl--" "Was not Helen Holbrook, but my daughter, Rosalind Hartridge. She has been away at school, and came home only a week ago. You are clearly mistaken; and if you will call, as you undoubtedly will, on your Miss Holbrook at St. Agatha's in the morning, you will undoubtedly find your young lady there quite safely in charge of--what was the name, Miss Patricia Holbrook?--in whose behalf you take so praiseworthy an interest." He was treating me quite as though I were a stupid school-boy, but I rallied sufficiently to demand: "If you are so peaceable and only a boat-maker here, will you tell me why you have enemies who are so anxious to kill you? I imagine that murder isn't common on the quiet shores of this little creek, and that an Italian sailor is not employed to kill men who have not a past of some sort behind them."