y before him. As he
pondered there was nothing more startling in the fact that he had not
hurried on to Banff than that she should be in Portsmouth when she had
told him she was leaving Washington immediately for the girls' camp in
Michigan.

Congdon was a name of evil omen. What business could Isabel have with
that unhappy lady that would cause her to delay her departure for the
West? His intimations that Putney Congdon might be dead had filled her
with horror, and yet she had hinted at his sister's dinner that the
taking of human life was a small matter. That a girl so wholly charming
and persuasive at a dinner table could be so stern and unreasonable at a
chance meeting afterward, shook his confidence in her sex, which that
memorable meeting had done much to establish upon firm ground. He had
been wholly stupid and tactless in pouncing upon her with what he
realized, under the calming influences of the brisk sea air, must have
struck her as the vaporings of a dangerous lunatic. He had never been
clever; he smarted now under the revelation that all things considered
he was an immitigable ass.

He went back to the hotel bitter but fortified by a resolution that
nothing should check him now in his desperate career. He had quarreled
with the inspiration of his new life, but in the end Isabel should have
reason to know how unjust she had been. It was something after all to
have seen her, perplexed, anxious and angry though she had been. She was
still the most wonderful girl he had ever met, the more remarkable for
the fact that now she had gone he had not the slightest idea of what had
brought her into the strange world inhabited by the quarreling and
fleeing Congdons. But men had suffered before for love of woman and he
would bear his martyrdom manfully, keeping the humiliating interview
carefully from the Governor.

The Governor returned from Hoky's funeral somewhat wistful, but he
described the burial with his accustomed enthusiasm.

"It will be one of the satisfactions of my life that I went," he
declared. "They didn't have the decency to bring in a minister--fancy
it! Blessed if I didn't step into the breach and make a few remarks
myself! I did, indeed, Archie, right there in the undertaker's joint,
with a lot of bumpkins staring! No man sinks so low that he hasn't got
some good in him; that was the burden of my argument. The sheriff came
up and wrung my hand when it was all over. He had heard my little
sermon a