of her progress, his
eyes, which were very keen, caught some movement in a fringe of
willows that lined the opposite shore of the river some three hundred
yards below. He looked more sharply. He had developed a hunter's
faculty for interpreting movement in the forest, and although he had
nothing more positive than instinct and a brief flash upon which to
base conclusions, he did not think that movement of the leaves was
occasioned by any creature native to the woods.

On impulse he rose, went inside, and taking his binoculars from their
case, focused the eight-power lenses on the screen of brush, keeping
himself well within the doorway where he could see without being seen.

It took a minute or so of covering the willows before he located the
cause of that movement of shrubbery. But presently he made out the
head and shoulders of a man. And the man was Bland, doing precisely
what Hollister was doing, looking through a pair of field glasses.
Hollister stood well back in the room. He was certain Bland could not
see that he himself was being watched. In any case, Bland was not
looking at Hollister's house. It was altogether likely that he had
been doing so, that he had seen Myra sitting beside Hollister with her
hand on his shoulder, bending forward to peer into Hollister's face.
And Hollister could easily imagine what Bland might feel and think.
But he was steadily watching Myra. Once he turned the glasses for a
few seconds on Hollister's house. Then he swung them back to Myra,
followed her persistently as she walked along the bank, on past
Lawanne's, on towards their own rude shack. And at last Bland shifted.
One step backward, and the woods swallowed him. One moment his
shoulders and his head stood plain in every detail, even to the
brickish redness of his skin and the curve of his fingers about the
glasses; the next he was gone.

Hollister sat thinking. He did not like the implications of that
furtive observance. A suspicious, watchful man is a jealous man. And a
jealous man who has nothing to do but watch and suspect and nurse that
mean passion was a dangerous adjunct to an unhappy woman.

Hollister resolved to warn Myra, to emphasize that warning. No one
could tell of what a dull egotist like Bland might be capable. The
very fact of that furtive spying argued an ignoble streak in any man.
Bland was stiff-necked, vain, the sort to be brutal in retaliation for
any fancied invasion of his rights. And his conception