drian feel the veriest culprit, and he
hastened to leave the room and the cabin. Hurrying to the beach he
appropriated Margot's little canvas canoe and pushed out upon the
lake. From her and Pierre he had learned to handle the light craft
with considerable skill and he now worked off his excitement by swift
paddling, so that there was soon a wide distance between him and the
island.

Then he paused and looked around him, upon as fair a scene as could
be found in any land. Unbroken forests bounded this hidden Lake
Profundis, out of whose placid waters rose that mountain-crowned,
verdure-clad Island of Peace, with its picturesque home, and its
cultured owner, who had brought into this best of the wilderness the
best of civilization.

"What is this mystery? How am I concerned in it? For I am, and mystery
there is. It is like that mist over the island, which I can see and
feel but cannot touch. Pshaw! I'm getting sentimental, when I ought to
be turning detective. Yet I couldn't do that--pry into the private
affairs of a man who's treated me so generously. What shall I do? How
can I go back there? But where else can I go?"

At thought that he might never return to the roof he had quitted, a
curious homesickness seized him.

"Who'll hunt what game they need? Who'll catch their fish? Who'll keep
the garden growing? Where can I study the forest and its furry people,
at first hand, as in the Hollow? And I was doing well. Not as I hope
to do, but getting on. Margot was a merciless critic, but even she
admitted that my last picture had the look, the spirit of the woods.
That's what I want to do, what Mr. Dutton, also, approved; to bring
glimpses of these solitudes back to the cities and the thousands who
can never see them in any other way. Well--let it go. I can't stay and
be a torment to anybody, and some time, in some other place, maybe----
Ah!"

What he had mistaken for the laughter of a loon was Pierre's halloo.
He was coming back, then, from the mainland where he had been absent
these past days. Adrian was thankful. There was nothing mysterious or
perplexing about Pierre, whose rule of life was extremely simple.

"Pierre first, second, and forever. After Pierre, if there was
anything left, then--anybody, the nearest at hand;" would have
expressed the situation; but his honest, unblushing selfishness was
sometimes a relief.

"One always knows just where to find Pierre," Margot had said.

So Adrian's answering hallo