them as his guests, and when they spread their wings and left him again
alone he felt he had been hardly used.

It was while he was sunk in this state of melancholy, and some months
after Miss Kirkland had sailed to Egypt, that hope returned.

For a week-end he had invited Holden and Lowell, two former classmates,
and Nelson Mortimer and his bride. They were all old friends of their
host and well acquainted with the cause of his discouragement. So they
did not ask to be entertained, but, disregarding him, amused themselves
after their own fashion. It was late Friday afternoon. The members of
the house-party had just returned from a tramp through the woods and had
joined Ainsley on the terrace, where he stood watching the last rays of
the sun leave the lake in darkness. All through the day there had been
sharp splashes of rain with the clouds dull and forbidding, but now the
sun was sinking in a sky of crimson, and for the morrow a faint moon
held out a promise of fair weather.

Elsie Mortimer gave a sudden exclamation, and pointed to the east.
"Look!" she said.

The men turned and followed the direction of her hand. In the fading
light, against a background of sombre clouds that the sun could not
reach, they saw, moving slowly toward them and descending as they moved,
six great white birds. When they were above the tops of the trees that
edged the lake, the birds halted and hovered uncertainly, their wings
lifting and falling, their bodies slanting and sweeping slowly, in short
circles.

The suddenness of their approach, their presence so far inland,
something unfamiliar and foreign in the way they had winged their
progress, for a moment held the group upon the terrace silent.

"They are gulls from the Sound," said Lowell.

"They are too large for gulls," returned Mortimer. "They might be wild
geese, but," he answered himself, in a puzzled voice, "it is too late;
and wild geese follow a leader."

As though they feared the birds might hear them and take alarm, the men,
unconsciously, had spoken in low tones.

"They move as though they were very tired," whispered Elsie Mortimer.

"I think," said Ainsley, "they have lost their way."

But even as he spoke, the birds, as though they had reached their goal,
spread their wings to the full length and sank to the shallow water at
the farthest margin of the lake.

As they fell the sun struck full upon them, turning their great pinions
into flashing white and silver