"It was--in--Florida," she gasped, "the--last--of March. The sailboat was a dreadful, flimsy, shattered thing. But he _would_ go out in it--_alone_--storm or no storm!" She spoke with a sudden sense of emotional importance, with a certain strange, fierce, new pride in the shortcomings of her Man. "He must have swamped within an hour. They found his boat. But they never found his body. Just as one could always find his pocket, but never his watch--his purse, but never his money--his song, but never his soul." Her broken self-control plunged deeper and deeper into bitterness. "It was a stupid--wicked--wilful--accident," she persisted, "and I can see him in his last, smothery--astonished-- moment--just--as--as--plainly--as--though--I--had--been--there. Do you think for an instant that he would swallow even--Death--without making a fuss about it? Can't you hear him rage and sputter: '_This_ is too salt! _This_ is too cold! Take it away and bring me another!' While all the time his frenzied mind was racing up and down some precious, memoried playground like the Harvard Stadium or the New York Hippodrome, whimpering, 'Everybody'll be there except--_me_--except M-E!'" The Pretty Lady's voice took on a sudden hurt, left-out resentment. "Of course," she hurried on, "he wasn't exactly sad to go--nothing could make him sad. But I know that it must have made him very _mad_. He had just bought a new automobile. And he had rented a summer place at Marblehead. And he wanted to play tennis in June--" She paused for an instant's breath, and Alrik crashed like a moose into the silence. "It was lung trouble!" he attested vehemently. "Cough, cough, cough, all the time. It came on specially worse in April, and she died in May. She wasn't never very strong, you know, but she'd been brought up in your wicked old steam-heated New York, and she would persist in wearing tissue-paper clothes right through our rotten icy winters up here. And when I tried to dose her like the doctor said, with cod-liver oil or any of them thick things, I couldn't fool her--she just up an' said it was nothin' but liquid flannel, and spit it out and sassed me. And Gruff--Growly-Dog-Gruff," he finished hastily, "I don't know what ailed him. He jus' kind of followed along about June." The Partridge Hunter drew a long, heavy breath. When he spoke at last, his voice sounded like the voice of a man who holds his hat in his hand, and the puffs of smoke from his pipe made a sort of little halo round his words. "Isn't it nice," he mused, "to think that while we four are cozying here to-night in the same jolly old haunts, perhaps they three--Man, Girl, and Dog--are cuddling off together somewhere in the big, spooky Unknown, in the shade of a cloud, or the shine of a star--talking--perhaps--about--_us_?" The whimsical comfort of the thought pleased me. I did not want any one to be alone on such a night.