This was written June 30th, only four days ago. It is the last entry in
the book. Listen!" She read, while the tears started to her eyes:

"I must try to get in some good books on natural history. If I could
make better friends with the little wild things around me I need never
be lonely. There is a young rabbit who seems disposed to hit it off with
me. I toss him a bit of biscuit after breakfast every morning. He comes
and waits for it now. He eats it daintily in my sight; then, with a
flirt of his absurd tail for 'thank you,' scampers down to the river to
wash it down."

"Those are not the thoughts of a man out of his mind."

"No," he admitted, "but everything you have read shows him to be of a
sensitive, high-strung nature. On such a man the sudden shock of our
coming----"

"Oh, then I have waited too long!" she cried despairingly. "And now I
can never repay!"

"Not necessarily," said Stonor with a dogged patience. "Such cases are
common in the North. But I never knew one to be incurable."

She took this in, and it comforted her partly; but her thoughts were
still busy with matters remote from Stonor. After a while she asked
abruptly: "What do you think we ought to do?"

"Start up the river at once," he said. "We'll hear news of him on the
way. We'll overtake him in the end."

She stared at him with troubled eyes, pondering this suggestion. At last
she slowly shook her head. "I don't think we ought to go," she murmured.

"What!" he cried, astonished. "You wish to stay here--after last night!
Why?"

"I don't know," she said helplessly.

"But if the man is really not right, he needs looking after. We ought to
hurry after him."

"It seems so," she said, still with the air of those who speak what is
strange to themselves; "but I have an intuition, a premonition--I don't
know what to call it! Something tells me that we do not yet know the
truth."

Stonor turned away helplessly. He could not argue against a woman's
reason like this.

"Ah, don't be impatient with me," she said appealingly. "Just wait
to-day. If nothing happens during the day to throw any light on what
puzzles us, I will make no more objections. I'll be willing to start
this afternoon, and camp up the river."

"It will give him twelve hours' start of us."

Her surprising answer was: "I don't think he's gone."

* * * * *

Stonor made his way over the old portage trail. He wished to have a look
at the Grea