“Now try to pry out that nail,” she commanded, pointing to one on the window casing. I obeyed, with the full expectation of breaking my knife short off. To my utter surprise, the blade cut straight through the nail, with less resistance than the wood around it offered. The nail head was shorn away. Dorothy and I sprang at the same moment to pick it up, and we met in a sudden collision. Only by the extraordinary presence of mind which I showed in clasping Dorothy closely in my arms was a complete spill averted. A soft tendril of the sweet spring woods swept my cheek, the velvet petal of a flower brushed by my lips, and my whole body was aflame. Scarcely the fraction of a second was Dorothy in my arms, yet it seemed as if eons of life had passed. As we scrambled to our feet, I could feel my face blazing. I looked at Dorothy. Her face was as suffused as mine felt. Just then Tom entered and stood gazing at us with a quizzical smile. “Head on collision,” he exclaimed, in mock alarm. “Another big accident.” Not a word did Dorothy reply to his badinage. She walked in an especially stately fashion to the window and stood gazing out, while I busied myself energetically in hunting once more for the end of the nail which my knife had shorn off. It was lying just by my side, and as I picked it up, it crumbled. “Why, these nail heads are putty,” I cried in amazement. “They’re simply imitations of nails.” In a minute Tom’s knife was in his hand, and, quite forgetting everything else, he was hacking away at a point where another nail head showed. “Putty on top to represent an old nail head, and wooden peg doing the business below,” he ejaculated. “I don’t believe there’s a bit of iron in the place.” Tom dug at nail head after nail head, and each flew off. “Dorothy, it’s a wooden room,” he cried. “Oh, really,” said Dorothy, in an entirely lifeless monotone. “And there is the horse’s head out of that window. You must have been blind not to have seen it before.” “We did see it,” I said testily. “But you’re so confoundedly impetuous you rush ahead before anybody can tell you anything.” Tom paid but slight attention to my remarks. He was up on a window sill, prying with his knife. “I’ve got it,” he exclaimed finally in triumph. “Here’s the place where they hung the wooden shutters on with wooden pegs, and they painted and puttied them over when they took the panels down.” He leaped down and started towards the other room. “I’m going to find out what the agent knows,” he called back over his shoulder. Dorothy still stood by the window, the later afternoon sun making a golden halo of her somewhat rumpled hair. As I watched her, there seemed to be something a trace less energetic in her posture. She was leaning against the window and gazing fixedly outward. She did not notice me at all. For ten minutes we remained in a silence broken only when Tom returned, waving a dirty piece of paper triumphantly.