ggie softly, "that she is just over there by the
camp-fire! Don't you suppose, if she loves you, she senses your
nearness?"

"That's it exactly," he replied in a gloomy voice, "if she loves me! But
does she? In other words, has she come up the river to meet me or to
meet my rival? She knows we are here. Both of us have written her. The
presence of one or the other of us is the real reason for this excursion
of hers. But again the question is--which?"

Here the match he was holding under the cigarette burned his fingers and
he flung it overboard with a violent gesture.

"The detective, of course," said Tish. "I knew it from the beginning of
your story."

"The detective," he assented. "You see his very profession attracts.
There's an element of romance in it. I myself have kept on with my
father and now run the--er--livery stable. My business is a handicap
from a romantic point of view.

"I am aware," Mr. McDonald went on, "that it is not customary to speak
so frankly of affairs of this sort; but I have two reasons. It hurts me
to rest under unjust suspicion. I am no spy, ladies. And the second
reason is even stronger. Consider my desperate position: In the morning
my rival will see her; he will paddle his canoe to the great rock below
your camp and sing his love song from the water. In the morning I shall
sit here helpless--ill, possibly--and see all that I value in life slip
out of my grasp. And all through no fault of my own! Things are so
evenly balanced, so little will shift the weight of her favor, that
frankly the first one to reach her will get her."

I confess I was thrilled. And even Tish was touched; but she covered her
emotion with hard common sense.

"What's her name?" she demanded.

"Considering my frankness I must withhold that. Why not simply refer to
her as the pink tam-o'-shanter--or, better still and more briefly, the
P.T.S.? That may stand for pink tam-o'-shanter, or the Person That
Smiles,--she smiles a great deal,--or--or almost anything."

"It also stands," said Hutchins, with a sniff, "for Pretty Tall Story."

Tish considered her skepticism unworthy in one so young, and told her
so; on which she relapsed into a sulky silence.

In view of what we knew, the bonfire at our camp and the small figure
across the river took on a new significance.

As Aggie said, to think of the red-haired man sleeping calmly while his
lady love was so near and his rival, so to speak, _hors de combat!_
Short