e. The sun fell warmly upon her, searching the
perfections of the childlike face and throat, gilding the palm of one
little, sun-tanned hand lying, partly open, on her knee. A spring-like
wind stirred a single strand of bright hair; lips slightly parted, she
lay there, face to the sky, and Marche thought that he had never looked
upon anything in all the world more pure and peaceful.

At noon the girl had not awakened. But something in John B. Marche had.
He looked in horrified surprise at the decoys, then looked at Molly
Herold; then he gazed in profound astonishment at Uncle Dudley, who made
a cryptic remark to the wife of his bosom, and then tipped upside down.

Marche examined the sky and water so carefully that he did not see them;
then, sideways, and with an increasing sensation of consternation, he
looked again at the sleeping girl.

His was not even a friendly gaze, now; there was more than dawning alarm
in it--an irritated curiosity which grew more intense as the seconds
throbbed out, absurdly timed by a most remarkable obligato from his
heart.

He gazed stonily upon this stranger into whose life he had drifted only
a week before, whose slumbers he felt that he was now unwarrantedly
invading with a mental presumption that scared him; and yet, as often as
he looked elsewhere, he looked back at her again, confused by the slowly
dawning recognition of a fascination which he was utterly powerless to
check or even control.

One thing was already certain; he wanted to know her, to learn from her
own lips intimately about herself, about her thoughts, her desires, her
tastes, her aspirations--even her slightest fancies.

Absorbed, charmed by her quiet breathing, fascinated into immobility, he
sat there gazing at her, trying to reconcile the steadily strengthening
desire to know her with what he already knew of her--of this sleeping
stranger, this shabby child of a poor man, dressed in the boots and
shooting coat of that wretchedly poor man--his own superintendent, a
sick man whom he had never even seen.

What manner of man could her father be--this man Herold--to have a child
of this sort, this finely molded, fine-grained, delicate, exquisitely
made girl, lying asleep here in a wind-stirred blind, with the Creator's
own honest sun searching out and making triumphant a beauty such as his
wise and city-worn eyes had never encountered, even under the mercies of
softened candlelight.

An imbecile repetition of spee