t gas? I've had that gas in my head ever since yesterday."

"Um-hm," wearily. "Well, I shouldn't think a little extry more or less
would make much difference. Never mind, don't waste any more on me.
Get the gas out of your head, if Roscoe wants you to. You can wash the
window afterward."

Lute's parting words were that he would fill that tank the very first
thing. If he had--but there! he didn't.

CHAPTER XVIII

The fog had come almost without warning. When, after leaving the bank,
at four o'clock or thereabouts, I walked down to the shore and pulled my
skiff out to where the Comfort lay at her moorings, there had not been
a sign of it. Now I was near the entrance of the bay, somewhere abreast
Crow Point, and all about me was gray, wet blankness. Sitting in the
stern of the little launch I could see perhaps a scant ten feet beyond
the bow, no more.

It was the sudden shift of the wind which had brought the fog. When I
left the boat house there had been a light westerly breeze. This had
died down to a flat calm, and then a new breeze had sprung up from the
south, blowing the fog before it. It rolled across the water as swiftly
as the smoke clouds roll from a freshly lighted bonfire. It blotted
Denboro from sight and moved across the bay; the long stretch of beach
disappeared; the Crow Point light and Ben Small's freshly whitewashed
dwellings and outbuildings were obliterated. In ten minutes the Comfort
was, to all appearances, alone on a shoreless sea, and I was the only
living creature in the universe.

I was not troubled or alarmed. I had been out in too many fogs on that
very bay to mind this one. It was a nuisance, because it necessitated
cutting short my voyage, although that voyage had no objective point and
was merely an aimless cruise in search of solitude and forgetfulness.
The solitude I had found, the forgetfulness, of course, I had not. And
now, when the solitude was more complete than ever, surrounded by
this gray dismalness, with nothing whatever to look at to divert my
attention, I knew I should be more bitterly miserable than I had been
since I left that wedding. And I had been miserable and bitter enough,
goodness knows.

Home and the village, which I had been so anxious to get away from, now
looked inviting in comparison. I slowed down the engine and, with an
impatient growl, bent over the little binnacle to look at the compass
and get my bearings before pointing the Comfort's nose in the