ho broke the spell. While Bainbridge was insisting that
Griswold should come in and make a social third at the hotel
dinner-table, the teller picked up his hand-bag and mounted the steps.
Griswold's brain fell into halves. With one of them he was making
excuses to the newspaper man; with the other he saw Broffin stop Johnson
and draw him aside.

What the detective was saying was only too plainly evident. Johnson
wheeled short to face the sidewalk group, and Griswold could feel in
every fibre of him the searching scrutiny to which he was being
subjected. When he stole a glance at the pair on the porch, Johnson was
shaking his head slowly; and he did it again after a second thoughtful
stare. Griswold, missing completely now what Bainbridge was saying,
overheard the teller's low-toned rejoinder to the detective's urgings:
"It's no use, Mr. Broffin; I'd have to swear positively to it, you
know, and I couldn't do that.... No, I don't want to hear your
corroborative evidence; it might make me see a resemblance where there
is none. Wait until Mr. Galbraith recovers: he's your man."

Griswold hardly knew how he made shift to get away from Bainbridge
finally; but when it was done, and he was crossing the little triangular
park which filled the angle between the business squares and the
lake-fronting residence streets, he was sweating profusely, and the
departing fear-mania was leaving him weak and tremulous.

Passing the stone-basined fountain in the middle of the park he stopped,
jerked the pistol from his pocket, spilled the cartridges from its
magazine, and stooped to grope for a loose stone in the walk-border.
With the fountain base for an anvil and the loosened border stone for a
hammer he beat the weapon into shapeless inutility and flung it away.

"God knows whom I shall be tempted to kill, next!" he groaned; and the
trembling fit was still unnerving him when he went on to keep the
appointment made by Charlotte Farnham.

XXXIX

DUST AND ASHES

A full moon, blood-red from the smoke of forest fires far to the
eastward, was rising over the Wahaska Hills when Griswold unlatched the
gate of the Farnham enclosure and passed quickly up the walk.

Since the summoning note had stressed the urgencies, he was not
surprised to find the writer of it awaiting his coming on the
vine-shadowed porch. In his welcoming there was a curious mingling of
constraint and impatience, and he was moved to marvel. Miss Farnham's
out