Griswold looked and was reasonably sure that he could make out the shadowy figure of a man leaning against one of the trees. "That is my shadow," she said, lowering her voice; "Mr. Matthew Broffin, of the Colburne Detective Agency, in New Orleans. He has a foolish idea that I am in communication with the man he is searching for, and he was brutal enough to tell me so. What he expects to accomplish by keeping an absurd watch upon our house and dogging everybody who comes and goes, I can't imagine." "You have told your father?" said Griswold, anxious to learn how far this new alarm fire had spread. "Certainly; and he has made his protest. But it doesn't do any good; the man keeps on spying, as you see. But we have wandered a long way from your book. I've been trying to prove to you that I am not fit to criticise it." "No; you mustn't mistake me. I haven't been coming to you for criticism," was Griswold's rather incoherent reply; and when the talk threatened to lapse into the commonplaces, he took his leave. Oddly enough, as he thought, when he was unlatching the gate and had shifted one of the newly purchased automatic pistols from his hip pocket to an outside pocket of the light top-coat he was wearing, the shadowy figure under the lake-shading trees had disappeared. It was only a few minutes after the lingering dinner guest had gone when the doctor came out on the porch, bringing his long-stemmed pipe for a bedtime whiff in the open air. "You are losing your beauty sleep, little girl," he said, dropping into the chair lately occupied by the guest. "Did you find out anything more to-night?" The daughter did not reply at once, and when she did there was a note of freshly summoned hardihood in her voice. "We were both mistaken," she affirmed. "Coincidences are always likely to be misleading. I am sorry I told you about them. He has certainly been a present help in time of need to Edward." "How did you reach your conclusion?" inquired the pipe smoker, upon whom the coincidences were still actively exerting their influence. "It came out in the talk this evening. He has been rather ridiculously putting me upon a pedestal, trying to make me fit an ideal character in his book, I think. To prove to him that I am only human, I told him the story of what happened on the _Belle Julie_. And, to cap the climax, I pointed out our friend Mr. Broffin, who was on guard again--as usual--and told him who the house watcher was and what he wanted. It didn't affect him any more than it would any friend of the family. He was interested in the story as a story, and--and in its bearing upon me as a--as a life-experience. But that was all."