hich to draw deductions; but the cultured tones of it and
the lilt of her low laughter bespoke an education and refinement with
which he failed to reconcile the idea that she was a lady burglar.
Yet----

He stopped paddling to listen intently. Several times now he had
thought he heard a sound off in the darkness behind him. It came
again--a slight hollow sound, as of a paddle scraping against a canoe.
They were being followed. Had the girl heard it, too? He waited for
the wail of the fog-horn to die away--and found her speaking.

"--frank with you, Mr. Kendrick," she was saying. "The circumstances
are less extraordinary than they appear to you. My--husband and I were
at a party at a friend's house on the Island. We paddled over in a
canoe and Joe went ahead of me to locate it. In the dark I must have
missed the spot where he was waiting for me and when you came along so
silently and so close to the bank I naturally thought it was Joe.
Ridiculously simple, you see."

"You have forgotten the launch," prompted Kendrick severely.

"I know nothing about the launch," she denied with resentment. "When I
heard those people coming I thought it was some of the guests from the
party who had said they would race us home. Will you please paddle on,
Mr. Kendrick. It is damp and chilly in this fog and I am naturally in
a hurry to get home."

He laughed with skepticism, but plied his paddle again. He was not as
concerned about the launch as he pretended, of course; at the worst it
probably meant that Stinson had been entertaining some of his friends
on the sly. He had no intention of handing his mysterious passenger to
the police. But was he to let her laugh at him and disappear
unchallenged into the fog out of which she had come?

Phil Kendrick's experience with the opposite sex was very limited, he
had to confess. He had been too completely absorbed in athletics to
afford girls more than passing attention. Those of his social
set--those he had met--had failed to impress him. One or two of them
were attractive enough in a general way, he realized; some were amusing
to him and some very very tedious. It was a new experience to find
himself actually interested in a girl--or rather, her voice! He wished
he could get a look at her till he remembered the poor showing he would
make with his blackened eye. Then he was thankful for the darkness.

Phil planned to land her at the Queen City Yacht Club at the foot of