ddressed him, had now fixed her eyes on him again. The latter turned
to her as he proceeded.

"The old house," he said, "would make a picture in itself with its
little stone-ribbed windows, and the much older square tower and
curtain wall that form one wing. There is a terraced garden in front,
and a stream comes frothing out of a wooded ghyll at the foot of it."

Weston started, for there was no doubt that the house Kinnaird
described was the one in which he had been born. As it happened, the
firelight fell upon his intent face as he waited for the answer, when
Miss Stirling, who had missed his start, asked a question:

"The people who owned it were friends of yours?"

"No," said Kinnaird, "I never saw them. I took the place through an
agency for the rough shooting and as a change from London. They had to
let it and live in a neighboring town. The result of slack management
and agricultural depression, I believe."

Weston set his lips. He had written home once rejecting a proposition
made him, and his people had afterward apparently forgotten him. He
had made up his mind that he would not trouble them again, at least
while he toiled as a track-grader or a hired man; but now, when it
seemed that trouble had come upon them, he regretted many things.

Kinnaird signed to him that he might take away the plates, and he
gathered them up, scarcely conscious of what he was doing, and then
stumbled and dropped the pile of them. Though made of indurated fiber,
they fell with a startling clatter, and Kinnaird looked at him sharply
as he picked them up; but in another few moments he had vanished
beyond the range of the firelight into the shadows of the bush.

Ida Stirling had, however, noticed enough to arouse a young woman's
curiosity, especially as there was a suggestion of romance in it, and
before she went to sleep she thought a good deal about the man she had
never seen until two days ago.

CHAPTER III

THE MODEL

The morning broke clear and still across the scented bush, and Miss
Kinnaird and Ida Stirling, who had been awakened early by the
wonderful freshness in the mountain air, strolled some distance out of
camp. For a time they wandered through shadowy aisles between the
tremendous trunks, breathing in sweet resinous odors, and then, soon
after the first sunrays came slanting across a mountain shoulder, they
came out upon a head of rock above the river. A hemlock had fallen
athwart it, and they sat dow