argery!" he said; and she laughed with the joyous unconstraint of a
happy child and came around to sit by him.

"I was doing time out on the veranda, and I saw you down here in the
moonlight, looking as if you had lost something," she explained, adding:
"Have you?"

"I don't know; can you lose that which you've never had?" he returned
musingly. And then: "Yes; perhaps I did lose something. Don't ask me
what it is. I hardly know, myself."

"You have just come from Doctor Bertie's?" she inquired.

"Yes."

"And Charlotte doesn't want to marry you?"

"Heavens and earth!" he exploded. "Who put the idea into your head that
I wanted to marry her?"

"You did"--calmly.

"Then, for pity's sake, let me take it out, quick. If I were the last
man on earth, Miss Farnham wouldn't marry me; and if she were the last
woman, I think I'd go drown myself in the lake!"

The young woman of the many metamorphoses was laughing again, and this
time the laugh was a letter-perfect imitation of a school-girl giggle.

"My!" she said. "How dreadfully hard she must have sat on you!"

"Please don't laugh," he pleaded; "unless you are the heartless kind of
person who would laugh at a funeral. I'm down under the hoofs of the
horses, at last, Margery, girl. Before you came, I was wondering if the
game were at all worth the candle."

Her mood changed in the twinkling of an eye. "The battle is over, and
won," she said, speaking softly. "Didn't you know that?" And then: "Oh,
boy, boy! but it has been a desperate fight! Time and again I have
thought you were gone, in spite of all I could do!"

"You thought--I was gone? Then you know?"

"Of course I know; I have known ever since the first night; the night
when I found the money in your suit-case. What a silly, silly thing it
was for you to do--to leave the Bayou State Security slips on the
packages!"

"But you said----"

"No, I didn't say; I merely let you believe that I didn't see them.
After that, I knew it would be only a question of time until they would
trace you here, and I hurried; oh, I _hurried_! I made up my mind that
before the struggle came, all Wahaska should know you, not as a bank
robber, but as you are, and I made it come out just that way. Then Mr.
Broffin turned up, and the fight was on. He shadowed you, and I shadowed
him--or had Johnnie Fergus do it for me. I knew he'd try Miss Farnham
first, and there was only one hope there--that she might fall in love
with you and so