ve such
foolish thoughts, Mr. Griswold?"

For one poignant second fear leaped alive again and he called himself no
better than a lost man. But the eyes that were lifted to his were the
eyes of a questioning child, so guilelessly innocent that he immediately
suffered another relapse into the pit of self-despisings.

"You have made me your poor prisoner, Miss Grierson," he said, speaking
to his own thought rather than to her question. And when they reached
the sidewalk and the trap: "May I bid you good-by here and go to my own
place?"

"Of course not!" she protested. "Mr. Raymer is coming to dinner to-night
and he will drive you over to Mrs. Holcomb's afterward, if you really
think you must go."

And for the first time in their comings and goings she let him lift her
to the high driving-seat.

XXIII

CONVERGING ROADS

Matthew Broffin had been two weeks and half of a third an unobtrusive
spy upon the collective activities of the Wahaskan social group which
included the Farnhams before he decided that nothing more could be
gained by further delay.

By this time he knew all there was to be known about Miss Farnham; the
houses she visited, the somewhat limited circle of her intimates and the
vastly wider one of her acquaintances, her comings and goings in the
town, her preference for church dissipations over the other sort, and
for croquet over lawn tennis.

Also, he had a more minute knowledge which would have terrified her if
she had suspected that any strange man was keeping an accurately
tabulated note-book record of her waking employments. He knew at what
hour she breakfasted, what time in the forenoons she spent upon her
Chautauqua readings, how much of her day was given to the care of her
invalid aunt, and, most important item of all, how, in the afternoons,
when her father was at his town office and the invalid was taking a nap
in her room, Miss Charlotte was usually alone in the living-rooms of
the two-storied house in Lake Boulevard: practically so for four days
out of the seven; actually so on Wednesdays and Fridays when Hilda
Larsen, the Swedish maid of all work, had her afternoons off.

Having his own private superstition about Friday, Broffin chose a
Wednesday afternoon for his call at the house on the lake front. It was
a resplendent day of the early summer which, in the Minnesota latitudes,
springs, Minerva-like, full-grown from the nodding head of the wintry
Jove of the north. In the doc