n proposal, this descent upon the
commercial festivities at the dam; and Elsa had yielded only after
exhausting her ingenuity in trying to defeat it. She had known in
advance that it could not be defeated. For weeks her father's attitude
had been explainable only upon a single hypothesis; one which she had
alternately accepted and rejected a hundred times during the two years
of dam-building; and this excursion was less singular than many other
consequences of the mysterious attitude.

She was recalling the mysteries as she sat on the pile of timbers with
Wingfield, hearing but not heeding the resounding periods of the orator
across the narrow chasm. With the inundation of the upper valley an
impending certainty, measurable by weeks and then by days, and now by
hours, nothing of any consequence had been done at Castle 'Cadia by way
of preparing for it. Coming down early one morning to cut flowers for
the breakfast-table, she had found two men in mechanics' overclothes
installing a small gasolene electric plant near the stables; this, she
supposed, was for the house-lighting when the laboratory should be
submerged. A few days later she had come upon Otto, the chauffeur,
building a light rowboat in a secluded nook in the upper canyon.

But beyond these apparently trivial precautions, nothing had been done,
and her father had said no word to her or to the guests of what was to
be done when the closed-in valley should become a lake with Castle
'Cadia for its single island. Meanwhile, the daily routine of the
country house had gone on uninterruptedly; and once, when Mrs. Van Bryck
had asked her host what would happen when the floods came, Elsa had
heard her father laughingly assure his guest in the presence of the
others that nothing would happen.

That Wingfield knew more than these surface indications could tell the
keenest observer, Elsa was well convinced; how much more, she could only
guess. But one thing was certain: ever since the day spent with Ballard
and Bromley and Jerry Blacklock at the construction camp--the day of his
narrow escape from death--the playwright had been a changed man;
cynical, ill at ease, or profoundly abstracted by turns, and never less
companionable than at the present moment while he sat beside her on the
timber balk, scowling up and across at the band-stand, at the spellbound
throng ringing it in, and at the spellbinding secretary shaming the
pouring torrent in the ravine below with his flo