r. Many
yards of underbrush separated him from the little time-devastated city of
the dead, but its mere proximity forced on him, as the old room had done,
a feeling of a stealthy and intangible companionship.

He stepped from the fringe of trees about the open space in the centre of
which the lake brooded. The water received with a destructive
indifference the fluttering caresses of the snowflakes. Bobby paused with
a quick expectancy. He saw nothing of the woman who had startled him that
first evening, but he heard from the thicket a sound like muffled
sobbing, and he responded again to the sense of a malevolent regard.

He hid himself among the trees, and in their shelter skirted the lake.
The sobbing had faded into nothing. For a long time he heard only the
whispers of the snow and the grief of the wind. When he had rounded the
lake and was some distance beyond it, however, the moaning reached him
again, and through the fast-deepening twilight he saw, as indistinctly as
he had before, a black feminine figure flitting among the trees in the
direction of the lake. Graham's theory lost its value. It was impossible
to fancy the brilliant, colourful dancer in this black, shadowy thing. He
commenced to run in pursuit, calling out:

"Stop! Who are you? Why do you cry through the woods?"

But the dusk was too thick, the forest too eager. The black figure
disappeared. In retrospect it was again as unsubstantial as a phantom.
The flakes whispered mockingly. The wind was ironical.

He found his pursuit had led him back to the end of the lake nearest the
Cedars. He paused. His triumph was not unmixed with fear. A black figure
stood in the open, quite close to him, gazing over the stagnant water
that was like a veil for sinister things. He knew now that the woman was
flesh and blood, for she did not glide away, and the snow made pallid
scars on her black cloak.

He crept carefully forward until he was close behind the black figure.

"Now," he said, "you'll tell me who you are and why you cry about
the Cedars."

The woman swung around with a cry. He stepped back, abashed, not knowing
what to say, for there was still enough light to disclose to him the
troubled face of Katherine, and there were tears in her eyes as if she
might recently have expressed an audible grief.

"You frightened me, Bobby."

Without calculation he spoke his swift thought: "Was it you I saw here
before? But surely you didn't cry in the house the o