him go. Then she did an odd
thing. She passed through the sitting room, entered the front hall, went
up the stairs, tiptoed by the door of her father's room, and then up
another flight to the attic. From here a steep set of steps led to the
cupola on the roof. In that cupola was a spyglass.

Annabel opened a window a few inches, took the spyglass from its rack,
adjusted it, laid it on the sill of the open window and knelt, the glass
at her eye. The floor of the cupola was very dusty and she was wearing
her newest and best gown, but she did not seem to mind.

Through the glass she saw the long slope of Cannon Hill, with the beacon
at the top and Captain Mayo's house near it. The main road was deserted
save for one figure, that of her late caller. He was mounting the hill
in long strides.

She watched him gain the crest and pass over it out of sight. Then she
shifted the glass so that it pointed toward the spot beyond the curve
of the hill, where the top of a thick group of silver-leafs hid the
parsonage. Above the tree tops glistened the white steeple of the
Regular church. If the minister went straight home she could not see
him. But under those silver-leafs was the beginning of the short cut
across the fields where Didama had seen Mr. Ellery walking on the
previous Sunday.

So Annabel watched and waited. Five minutes, then ten. He must have
reached the clump of trees before this, yet she could not see him.
Evidently, he had gone straight home. She drew a breath of relief.

Then, being in a happier frame of mind, and the afternoon clear and
beautiful, she moved the glass along the horizon, watching the distant
white specks across the bay on the Wellmouth bluffs--houses and
buildings they were--the water, the shore, the fish weirs, the pine
groves. She became interested in a sloop, beating into Wellmouth harbor,
and watched that. After a time she heard, in the house below, her father
shouting her name.

She gave the glass one more comprehensive sweep preparatory to closing
it and going downstairs. As she did this a moving speck came into view
and vanished.

Slowly she moved the big end of the spyglass back along the arc it had
traveled. She found the speck and watched it. It was a man, striding
across the meadow land, a half mile beyond the parsonage, and hurrying
in the direction of the beach. She saw him climb a high dune, jump a
fence, cross another field and finally vanish in the grove of pines on
the edge o