experienced a pleasant tingle in
the blood when he reflected that this may have been the wrong reading
and very different from the sense she meant to convey. His spirits
soared as he decided that the last line was intended to be read
unbrokenly and that it constituted a challenge, flung at him with a toss
of her head, a flash of the brown eyes.

This thought was wholly heartening and he dwelt upon it a long time. She
must have thought him capable of deeds of high emprise or she would not
have chosen this fragment as her last word to him. Her choice of a
message implied a certain faith that he might, if he chose, break the
shackles of fear and custom that bound him and do something that would
lift him out of himself. The card with the good wishes gave a soothing,
saving personal touch to the communication. She had drawn the pen across
a Chicago street number and supplied no other address; but after a dark
moment in which he accepted this as a delicate hint that the incident
was closed, he concluded that very likely she had deleted the address
hastily for the reason that she was to disappear into the woods for the
summer. Still, she might have substituted the camp address and he
fretted over this for an hour. She left him without excuse for a reply,
and he gravely reflected that the Marquis of Montrose was the only
person to whom he could protest, but as she had copied from the
quotation book the figures "1621-1640" and added them to the name for
his illumination, it was clearly impossible to ask the author for an
interpretation of his stanza.

Archie was lulled to sleep by the encouraging thought that what she had
done was to give him a commission to redeem himself by strange and
moving adventures, and he dreamed that he had climbed to the remote
fastnesses of the Rockies, and captured a mountain sheep alive and
walked into his sister's house with the animal under his arm and
presented it to Miss Perry at the tea table.

He changed trains at Boston and again at Portsmouth, where he checked
his bag. At two o'clock he reached Bailey Harbor, where he verified his
memorandum as to the return trip and found the telegram he expected from
the New York brokerage office in which he was a silent partner, saying
that his booking for Banff had been changed as requested. He never took
the chance of being stuffed into an upper berth, or riding in a day
coach, and he congratulated himself upon his forethought and the ease
with which