d,
yet it was this same summer.

"I feel as if I had lived a long time since I played with that clay," she
said, wistfully; "so many things have been made different for me."

Then she arose and walked about the little room restlessly, while the eyes
of Harris never left her. Into the other room she had not gone at all, for
in it was the dead stranger.

"When do you look for your uncle and Mr. Haydon?" she asked, at last, for
the silences were hardest to endure.

She would laugh, or argue, or ridicule--do anything rather than sit silent
with questioning eyes upon her. She even grew to fancy that Harris must
accuse her--he watched her so!

"When do we look for them? Well, I don't dare let myself decide. I only
hope they may have made a start back, and will meet the captain on his
way. As to Dan--he had not so very much the start, and they ought to catch
up with him, for there were the two Indian canoeists--the two best ones;
and when they are racing over the water, with an object, they surely ought
to make better time than he. I can't see that he had any very pressing
reason for going at all."

"He doesn't talk much about his reasons," she answered.

"No; that's a fact," he agreed, "and less of late than when I knew him
first. But he'll make Akkomi talk, maybe, when he arrives--and I hope you,
too."

"When he arrives!"

She thought the words, but did not say them aloud. She sat long after Max
had left her, and thought how many hours must elapse before they
discovered that Dan had not followed the other men to the lake works. She
felt sure that he was somewhere in the wilderness, avoiding the known
paths, alone, and perhaps hating her as the cause of his isolation,
because she would not confess what the man was to her, but left him
blindly to keep his threat, and kill him when found in her room.

Ah! why not have trusted him with the whole truth? She asked herself the
question as she sat there, but the mere thought of it made her face grow
hot, and her jaws set defiantly.

She would not--she could not! so she told herself. Better--better far be
suspected of a murder--live all her life under the blame of it for
him--than to tell him of a past that was dead to her now, a past she
hated, and from which she had determined to bar herself as far as silence
could build the wall. And to tell him--him--she could not.

But even as she sat, with her burning face in her hands, quick, heavy
steps came to the door, halted