not all. She skipped up again, and--invited me to do the same."

"And did you?"

"Well I had to. It was in the nature of a challenge, you see. I tell
you squarely and as man to man, I would willingly have forfeited a
year's pay to have got out of it--when I got on to the beastly log, I
believe I would have forfeited five. But how could I have backed out of
doing a thing a girl had just done, and thought nothing of? Ugh! it
gives me the cold shivers all down the back even now, to look back on
those few moments when I sat, hung out in mid-air, over that ghastly
height. And, you must remember the krantz slopes away _inwards_ from
the top just there. Ugh!"

Vine sat back in his chair and chuckled. Elvesdon was obviously an
imaginative chap, he was saying to himself. Why, as he told the story
he was going through the experience again, and part of its horror had
taken hold on him.

"Well, what did she say when you came back?" he said.

"That I was the only one besides herself who had ever done it. She had
asked several, and they had all cried off. I don't say it to brag,
mind--in proof whereof I don't mind adding that she said she could see I
was in a beastly funk all the time, because my hand on the branch of the
infernal tree shook, and, by the Lord, it did."

"Reminds one of the old yam about the lady and the knight and the jay's
nest on the castle wall," said the doctor. "Never mind, Elvesdon. I'm
one of those who funked going on it. She asked me to once."

"The devil she did."

"Yes. I told her straight I was much too old and fat to launch out in
those circus experiments. But that excuse wouldn't do with an athletic
young 'un like you."

"Well, several other `athletic young 'uns' seem to have shied at it
anyway. Here, I seem to be bragging again but I don't mean to. Of
course a man's a fool to try and do a thing of that sort if he knows he
can't. Still, I thought I could--at a pinch." And again the listener
chuckled.

"By the way, Vine," said Elvesdon tentatively, "you've been here a long
time and I'm only a new broom. Did you know Thornhill's wife?"

"Yes."

"What was she like. You know I've been over at their place several
times, and have never seen any portrait of her of any kind. Nor have I
ever heard her alluded to in any way."

"No. You wouldn't be likely to."

Elvesdon nodded.

"I see," he said.

"No--not that. You're on the wrong track. Look here, Elvesdon," went
on