“I’m really beginning to believe that you girls have let your imaginations run away from you,” Will remarked, when they sat about the living-room after a satisfying supper, just luxuriating in idleness. “Or perhaps the gentleman has been frightened away by our coming,” Roy suggested in a superior tone that made the girls want to throw something at him. “Perhaps he is afraid of the uniform of the U. S. A.” “He may be afraid of the uniform,” sniffed Mollie scathingly. “But he certainly couldn’t be afraid of _you_.” “Now you don’t mean that, you know you don’t,” laughed Roy, drawing her down beside him on the couch and holding her there with an iron grip of his brown fingers. “Say you didn’t, like a pretty little girl, and I’ll let you go.” “I won’t say any such!!” Mollie began, then suddenly her gaze stiffened into such a stare of wonder, and even alarm, that it made the girls fairly hold their breath. “Mollie, what is it?” demanded Roy commandingly. “Over there!” she shrieked. “At the window, Roy! Do you see it?” CHAPTER XXII. TRAGEDY There, pressed so close to the pane of the window that the nose was flattened grotesquely, eyes wildly staring, hair disheveled, was a face that even in that tense moment the girls recognized! the face of Professor Dempsey! It took the boys perhaps a second to fling out of the room, jump down the steps of the porch and circle the house to the window. And yet, in that second, the man was gone, leaving no more trace than if the earth had opened and swallowed him up. For almost an hour the boys searched the woods about the lodge, refusing to allow the girls to accompany them, saying truly that they would hamper them more than they could help. “You see, I was right after all,” Amy stated for at least the tenth time. “From the moment the idea came to me, I felt almost sure that poor crazy Professor Dempsey was this thing that was frightening us.” “But did you ever see such an awful face in all your life?” said Mollie, shuddering at the recollection. “And the look in his eyes as he stared at Roy,” Grace added in a hushed voice. “I shouldn’t wonder if! if we hadn’t been there, he might have murdered him.” “Oh, Gracie, don’t!” Amy clapped her hands to her ears. “We are frightened enough without having you say things like that.” “Suppose,” said Mollie, in a sepulchral voice, “he should come back before the boys do?” “That’s just what I was thinking,” said a quiet voice behind them, and they jumped and cried out in alarm. The next moment they saw it was Mrs. Irving and felt ashamed of themselves. “I think you had all better come into the house till the boys come back,” their chaperon continued. “I shall feel safer when we are behind locked doors.” The girls shivered, but Mollie protested. “Suppose anything should happen to the boys?” she asked, but here Mrs. Irving chose to exercise her authority.