ar was still in her eyes
as she met his.

"What is the matter?" he asked. "You look frightened."

"I am a little--I have a curious feeling of uneasiness--as if something
were going to happen."

"'Out of the depths of the hollow gloom,
On her soul's bare sands she heard it boom,
The measured tide of the sea of doom,'"

he quoted lightly. "I fancy when one is too happy, the jealous gods
run the quicksilver of our little spiritual barometers down for a
moment, merely to remind us that we are mortals after all."

The shadow on her face lifted, and she smiled into his ardent eyes.

"Ah, Mary!" he whispered. "Mary!"

LIV

As they left the boathouse an hour later and walked up the steep path
to the camp, once more that sense of coming disaster drove into her
mind and banished the memory of the past hour, when she had forgotten
it. What did it mean? She recalled that she had had dark
presentiments before in her life, and they had always come in the form
of this sudden mental invasion, as if some malignant homeless spirit
exulted in being the first to hint at the misfortune to come.

But the camp was silent. Every one, apparently, had gone to bed, and
slept the sleep of valiant souls and weary bodies. One lamp burned in
the living-room, and Clavering turned it out and they parted
lingeringly, and she went up to her room.

She had barely taken off her coat and scarf when she heard a tap on her
door. She stared for a moment in panic, then crossed the room swiftly
and opened it. Mr. Dinwiddie, wrapped against the cold in a padded
dressing-gown and with noiseless slippers on his feet, entered and
closed the door behind him.

"What has happened?" she demanded sharply. "Something. I know it."

"Don't look so frightened, my dear. I have no bad news for you. Only
it's rather annoying, and I knew I shouldn't get a word alone with you
in the morning."

"What is it? What is it?"

"I had this telegram an hour ago from Trent." He took a sheet of paper
from the pocket of his dressing-gown, covered with handwriting. "Of
course those bumpkins down in Huntersville took their time about
telephoning it up. Luckily the telephone is over in Larsing's room----"

Mary had snatched the paper from his hand and was reading it aloud.

"Hohenhauer took morning train for Huntersville stop will spend night
there and go to camp in morning stop must see M. Z. stop don't let
anything prevent stop very import