that the day when her
husband must face his issue was terribly near.

Indian summer is a false glory and a brief one, with alluring beauty
like the music of a swan-song, and it had been in an Indian summer of
present possession that she had lived from day to day, refusing to
contemplate the future--but that could not go on.

The old journal which had fired her imagination as a door to a new life
had lain through these days neglected--but they had been days of nearer
and more urgent realities and, after all, the diary had seemed to belong
to a world of dreams.

One of these fall afternoons when the skies were lowering and Parish was
out in the woods with Sim Squires she remembered it with a pang of
guilty neglect such as one might feel for an ill-used friend, and went
to the attic to take it out of its hiding and renew her acquaintance.

But when she opened the old horsehide trunk it was not there and panic
straightway seized her.

If the yellowed document were lost, she felt that a guardian spirit had
removed its talisman from the house, and since she was a practical soul,
she remembered, too, that the note-release bearing Bas Rowlett's
signature had been folded between its pages! With her present
understanding of Bas that thought made her heart miss its beat.

Dorothy was almost sure she had replaced it in the trunk after reading
it the last time, yet she was not quite certain, and when Parish came
back she was waiting for him with anxiety-brimming eyes. She told him
with alarm in her face of the missing diary and of the receipt which had
been enclosed and he looked grave, but rather with the air of
sentimental than material interest.

"Thet old diary-book was in ther chist not very long ago," he declared.
"I went up thar an' got ther receipt out when I fared over ter Sam
Opdyke's arraignin'. I tuck hit ter ther co'te-house an' put hit ter
record thet day--ther receipt, I means."

"How did ye git inter ther chist without my unlockin' hit?" she inquired
with a relief much more material than sentimental, and he laughed.

"Thet old brass key," he responded, "war in yore key basket--an ye
warn't in ther house right then, so I jest holped myself."

That brass key and that ancient record became the theme of conversation
for two other people about the same time.

In the abandoned cabin which had come to be the headquarters of Bas
Rowlett in receiving reports from, and giving instructions to, his
secret agents, h