The more he thought of it, the more he regretted his haste in consenting to incur the risk. Reflectively weighing the chances for and against, he made sure that in characterizing the young woman whose life-thread had been so strangely tangled with his own he had not overrated her intelligence. Giving heredity its due, with the keen-witted little physician for her father she could scarcely fail to measure up to the standard of those whose gifts are apperceptive. For many days she had had ample opportunity to familiarize herself with all the little identifying individualities of the deck-hand: reasoning from cause to effect, it might be assumed that her crushing responsibility had driven her to make use of it. Having recognized him once, under conditions far less favorable than those he was about to hazard, was it not more than probable that she would be able to do it again? Griswold took a final look at himself in his dressing-case mirror before going to keep his evening appointment at the doctor's down-town office. It was comfortably reassuring. So far as he could determine, there was little in the clean-shaven, square-shouldered, correctly garmented young fellow who faced him in the mirror to suggest either the bearded outcast of New Orleans or the unkempt and toil-soddened roustabout of the _Belle Julie_. If only she had not made him speak to her: he had a sharp conviction that the greatest of all the hazards lay in the chance that she might remember his voice. He found the cheery little doctor waiting for him when he had walked the few squares to the Main Street office. "I was beginning to be afraid you were going to be fashionably late," said the potential host; and then, with a humorous glance for the correct garmenting: "Regalia, heh? Hasn't Miss Grierson told you that Wahaska is still hopelessly unable to live up to the dress-coat and standing collar? I'm sure she must have. But never mind; climb into the buggy and we'll let old Bucephalus take us around to see if the neighbors have brought in anything good to eat." The drive was a short one, and it ended at the gate through which Matthew Broffin had preceded by only a few hours the man whose eventual appearance at the Farnham home he had so confidently predicted. As at many another odd moment when there had been nothing better to do, Broffin was once more shadowing the house in which, first or last, he expected to trap his amateur MacHeath; and when the buggy was halted at the carriage step he was near enough to mark and recognize the doctor's companion. "Not this time," he muttered, sourly, when the two had passed together up the gravelled path and the host was fitting his latch-key to the front door. "It's only the sick man that writes books. I wonder what sort of a book he thinks he's going to write in this inforgotten, turkey-trodden, come-along village of the Reuben yaps!"