At seven Katherine and her father sat down to dinner. She had known all day that something was going wrong with her father's affairs, and she could read in his silent preoccupied manner that he had not yet been able to see a way out of the difficulty. She knew that she could not make him forget his troubles. Many vain attempts had taught her that, so she waited. The long dinner wore on Porter's nerves; once he rose suddenly and walked toward his library, but stopped short when he reached the door and came back to the table. Then he drummed on the arm of his chair. “Two days more of this,” he said, with a nervous laugh, “and that man Black will have my life to answer for.” “Judge Black?” asked Katherine. “What has he done?” “Done? He's disappeared off the face of the earth just at this particular moment when I've got to have him here.” “Why,” cried Katherine, “I know where he is. He's at the Grand View Hotel--” she paused and leaned forward, her elbows on the table and her hands clasped before her. “It's some place up in Wisconsin that sounds like alpaca. Waupaca--that's it. Grand View Hotel, Waupaca, Wisconsin.” “Are you sure that's right?” he asked. “How do you know?” “Mr. West told me,” she answered. “There was such a good joke on him in the paper. I meant to tell you about it.” But Porter was smiling over something else. After a moment he said:-- “We'd have been swamped long ago in this M. & T. business if it hadn't been for the kind services of that wise and valuable young man, West. I think I'll pay him a regular salary after this to keep him on the other side in all the fights I get into. Lord, what a fool he is!” He left the room so abruptly that he did not see how Katherine's cheeks reddened, nor how her lips pressed together in vexation. If he had he would not have known the reason for it any more than Katherine did. Rainbow Lake is pretty in the daytime, but it is beautiful under the moonlight when you can stretch out distances and imagine that the lights at Bagley's Landing are those of a city twenty miles away, and when the solid pine groves on Maple and Government islands loom up big and black. The Judge was enjoying his vacation the better for its lateness. He had bolted his supper early enough to secure his favorite chair in the best part of the piazza: a mandolin orchestra was playing a waltz from “The Serenade,” and playing it well, the Judge thought. He threw away the match with which he had lighted his third cigar--to keep off the mosquitoes, he blandly told his conscience--and leaned back in the Morris chair, thinking how congruously comfortable it all was, now that he had his own clothes and the 'bus man could work without soiling his other suit. A clerk came out of the office, peered about in the half light for a moment, and approached the Judge, touching him on the shoulder. “Judge Black,” he said, “Truesdale wants to talk to you on the 'phone.”