out of the pipe,--and where the girl I had had in my head
for ten years would be waiting for me.

Don't imagine it was any girl I knew that I was thinking of; it was just
a dream girl I meant to marry, when I found her. I'd never met such a
girl anywhere, and it sounds like a fool to say I knew I was going to
meet her: that she was waiting somewhere in the world for me, just as I
was looking for her. I knew exactly what she must be like. She would
have that waving bronze-gold hair that stands out in little separate,
shining tendrils; eyes that startled you with their clear blue under
dark, level eyebrows--I never look twice at a girl with arched
brows--the rose-white, satin-smooth skin that goes with all of them, and
she would move like----Well, you've seen Pavlova move! Her
voice--somehow one of the most important things I knew about her seemed
to be her voice--would be the clear, carrying kind that always sounds
gay. I was certain I should know my dream girl--first--by that. And that
was the girl--I forgot it was all made-up child's play--who somewhere in
the world was waiting for me, Nick Stretton; a fool with nothing on
earth but six feet of a passably good body, and a dark, high-nosed face
like an Indian's, who was working in the bush for Wilbraham instead of
sieving creation for her. Well, I would start to-morrow; and, where the
clean heavens meant me to, I should find her!

And with the words I came alive to the dark lake, and the leaky canoe I
sat in, and the knowledge that all I had been thinking about a
bronze-haired girl was just the cracked dream of a lonely man. Even if
it had not been, and I could have started to look for a real girl
to-morrow, I had to get back to Wilbraham's to-night. My drenched
clothes were freezing on me, and I was hungrier than the wolf who had
just howled again, as I picked up my slippery paddle and started for the
La Chance landing.

There was no light there, naturally, since no one ever used the lake
except myself, and I had been away for months; but as I rounded the
point between the canoe and the landing, and slipped into the dark of
its shadow, the lamplight from Wilbraham's living room shone out on me
in a narrow beam, like a moon path on the water. As I crossed it and
beached the canoe I must have been in plain sight to any one on the
shore, though all I saw was the dark shingle I stepped upon. I stooped
to lift the canoe out of water,--and I did what you mean when you say