Passing easily from Miss Farnham the ideal to Miss Farnham the flesh-and-blood reality, he was moved to wonder mildly why the fate which had brought him twice into critically intimate relations with her was now denying him even a chance meeting. For a week or more he had been going out daily; sometimes with Miss Grierson in the trap, but oftener afoot and alone. The walking excursions had led him most frequently up and down the lakeside drive, but the doctor's house stood well back in its enclosure, and there was much shrubbery. Once he had heard her voice: she was reading aloud to some one on the vine-screened porch. And once again in passing, he had caught a glimpse of a shapely arm with the loose sleeve falling away from it as it was thrust upward through the porch greenery to pluck a bud from the crimson rambler adding its graceful mass to the clambering vines. It was rather disappointing, but he was not impatient. In the fulness of time the destiny which had twice intervened would intervene again. He was as certain of it as he was of the day-to-day renewal of his strength and vitality; and he could afford to wait. For, whatever else might happen in a mutable world, neither an ideal nor its embodiment may suffer change. As if to add the touch of definitiveness to the presumptive conclusion, a voice broke in upon his revery; the voice of the young woman whose most alluring charm was her many-sided changefulness. "What? no trap yet? Thorsen is outliving his usefulness; he is getting slower and pokier every added day he lives!" the voice was saying, with a faintly acid quality in it that Griswold had seldom heard. Then, as if she had marked his preoccupied gaze and divined its object: "You must have a little more patience, Mr. Griswold. All things come to him who waits. When you have left Mereside finally, Doctor Bertie will some time take you home to dinner with him." For his own peace of mind, Griswold hastily assured himself that it was only the wildest of chance shots. Since the day when he had admitted that he knew Miss Farnham's name without knowing Miss Farnham in person, the doctor's daughter had never been mentioned between them. "How did you happen to guess that I was thinking of the good doctor?" he asked, curiously. "You were not thinking of Doctor Bertie; you were thinking of Doctor Bertie's 'only'," was the laughing contradiction; and Griswold was glad that the coming of the man with the trap saved him from the necessity of falling any farther into what might easily prove to be a dangerous pitfall. Later on, while he was mechanically lifting his hat in recognition of the many salutations acknowledged by his companion in their triumphal progress down Main Street, he was still thankful and still puzzling over the almost uncanny coincidence. It was not the first time that Miss Grierson had seemed able to read his inmost thoughts.