How long
was he to stay? How was he to get away again? Had this girl caught him
like a rat in a trap, or did she mean well by him? If, as he supposed, she
was Wayne's daughter, she would probably not be slow in carrying out her
father's plan of handing him back to justice--and yet his mind refused to
connect the wraith of the night before with either police work or
betrayal. Her appearance had been so dim and fleeting that he could have
fancied her the dryad of a dream, had it not been for his surroundings.

He began to examine them once more, inspecting the water-colors on the
wall one by one, in search of some clew to her personality. The first
sketch was of a nun in a convent garden--the background vaguely French,
and yet with a difference. The next was of a trapper, or voyageur, pushing
a canoe into the waters of a wild northern lake. The next was a group of
wigwams with squaws and children in the foreground. Then came more nuns;
then more voyageurs with their canoes; then more Indians and wigwams It
occurred to Ford that the nuns might have been painted from life, the
voyageurs and Indians from imagination He turned to the two framed
drawings on the chimney-piece Both represented winter scenes. In the one a
sturdy voyageur was conveying his wife and small personal belongings
across the frozen snow on a sled drawn by a team of dogs. In the other a
woman, apparently the same woman as in the preceding sketch, had fallen in
the midst of a blinding storm, while a tall man of European
aspect--decidedly not the voyageur--was standing beside her with a baby in
his arms. These were clearly fancy pictures, and, so it seemed to Ford,
the work of one who was trying to recapture some almost forgotten memory.
In any case he was too deeply engrossed by his own situation to dwell on
them further.

He wheeled round again toward the centre of the room, impatiently casting
about him for something to eat. The tin box, from which he had devoured
all the biscuits, lay empty on the floor, but he picked it up and ate
hungrily the few crumbs sticking in its corners. He ransacked the small
dark room in the hope of finding more, but vainly. As far as he could see,
the cabin had never been used for the purpose it was meant to serve, nor
ever occupied for more than a few hours at a time. It had probably been
built in a caprice that had passed with its completion. He guessed
something from the fact that there was no visible attempt to sketch th