the key--had worked exactly as the circular of directions
declared it would do. He was a prisoner in that boathouse.

Even then he did not fully grasp the situation. He uttered an
exclamation of impatience and tugged at the door; but it was heavy,
jammed tight in its frame, and the lock was new and strong. He might as
well have tried to pull up the wharf.

After a minute of fruitless effort he gave up the attempt on the door
and moved about the little building, seeking other avenues of escape.
The only window was a narrow affair, high up at the back, hung on hinges
and fastened with a hook and staple. He climbed up on the fish nets and
empty boxes, got the window open, and thrust his head and one shoulder
through the opening. That, however, was as far as he could go. A dwarf
might have squeezed through that window, but not an ex-varsity athlete
like Russell Brooks or a husky longshoreman like "John Brown." It was
at the back, facing the mouth of the creek and the sea, and afforded
a beautiful marine view, but that was all. He dropped back on the fish
nets and audibly expressed his opinion of the lock and the man who had
bought it.

Then he tried the door again, again gave it up, and sat down on the fish
nets to think. Thinking was unsatisfactory and provoking. He gave that
up, also, and, seeing a knothole in one of the boards in the landward
side of his jail, knelt and applied his eye to the aperture. His only
hope of freedom, apparently, lay in the arrival home of the lightkeeper.
If Seth had arrived he could shout through that knothole and possibly be
heard.

The knothole, however, commanded a view, not of the lighthouse
buildings, but of the cove and the bungalow. The bungalow! Ruth Graham!
Suddenly, and with a shock, flashed to his mind the thought that his
imprisonment, if at all prolonged, was likely to be, not a joke, but the
most serious catastrophe of his life.

For Ruth Graham was going to leave the bungalow and Eastboro that very
day. He had begged to see her once more, and this day was his last
chance. He had written her, pleading to see her and receive his answer.
If he did not see her, if Seth did not return before long and he
remained where he was, a prisoner and invisible, the last chance was
gone. Ruth would believe he had repented of his declaration as embodied
in the fateful note, and had fled from her. She had intimated that he
was a coward in not seeing his fiancee and telling her the truth. Sh