copy of the _Daily Wahaskan_ laid beside his breakfast plate made it
unnecessary to telephone Raymer. The paper had a full account of the
sudden ending of the lock-out and the resumption of work in the Raymer
plant, and he read it with a curious stirring of self-compassion. As he
had reasoned it out, there was only one way in which the result could
have been attained so quickly. Had Raymer taken that way, in spite of
his wrathful rejection of the suggestion? Doubtless he had; and on the
heels of that conclusion came a sense of deprivation that was fairly
appalling, and the healthy breakfast appetite vanished. Griswold knew
what it meant, or he thought he did. Margery Grierson was gone out of
his life--gone beyond recall.

After that, there was all the better reason why he should grapple with
himself in the fallow interval; and for two complete days he was lost,
even to the small world of the summer resort, tramping for hours in the
lake shore forests or drifting about in one of the hotel skiffs, and
returning to the Inn only to eat and sleep when hunger or weariness
constrained him. On the whole, the discipline was good. He flattered
himself that the sense of proportion was returning slowly, and with it
some saner impulses. Truly, it had been his misfortune to be obliged to
compromise with evil to some extent, and to involve others, but was not
that rather due to the ineradicable faults of an imperfect social system
than to any basic defect in his own theories? And was not the same
imperfect social system partly responsible for the _quasi_-criminal
attitude which had been forced upon him? He was willing to believe it;
willing, also, to believe that he could rise above the constraining
forces and be the man he wished to be. That he could so rise was proved,
he decided, on the morning of the third day, when he chanced to overhear
the hotel clerk telling the man whose room was across the corridor from
his own that Andrew Galbraith still had a fighting chance for life. In
the pleasant glow of the high resolve the news awakened none of the
murderous promptings, but rather the generous hope that it might be
true.

It was late in the afternoon of this third day, upon his return from a
long pull in the borrowed skiff around the group of islands in the upper
and unfrequented part of the lake, that he found a note awaiting him. It
was from Miss Farnham, and its brevity, no less than its urgency,
stirred him apprehensively, brin