But Josephine Stone needed no artificial setting. A dream of fresh young womanly loveliness she was; a gentle presence that would brighten and glorify the most monotonous surroundings. Men wherever she had appeared had been swayed by this girl’s rare beauty, by the charm of her voice and her every gesture.
She had long since learned her power over men; this morning she was minded to test it impelled as she was by that resistless motive that has been called a woman’s curiosity—the motive that first brought mortal man to grief.
She moved about the room as one who is suppressing by will the tensest inward anxiety. Her Indian woman dismissed, she had tried to interest herself in a book, but her gaze most of the time was centred through the eastern window on a jutting point of the lake’s shoreline.
Josephine Stone dropped the book and caught at her breath. Round the point there suddenly flashed the slender red hull of a racing motor boat, bow reared in air above a creamy wavelet that widened V-like in its wake. The boat swept down the shoreline and the muffled staccato of its engines ceased abruptly as it dived from view under the shrubbery that fringed the island.
II
The girl watched with bated breath. From an opening in the shrubbery there almost immediately burst into view the figure of a man who seemed the incarnation of this wild place. Spare was he, but of height, build and movement that bespoke physical strength of lightninglike potentialities. The exotic pallor of his masterful face accentuated the blackness of his alert, flashing eyes.
The Indian man-of-all-work, splitting firewood to the side of the cottage, looked up, gasped and scuttled from view. His wolf-dog sank back on his haunches, tilted his grey snout in air and sent forth a long, dolorous howl that brought mocking echoes from the cliffs of the mainland.
The visitor, quite unconcerned by the seeming panic his appearance provoked, strode easily to the front door.
Josephine Stone rose all a-tremble. A fear unaccountable had suddenly swept over her, but when she opened the door for him there was no longer outward trace of it.
“Oh, Mr. Smith,” she voiced, “I know I have put you to a lot of trouble to come over here this morning. It is really too good of you simply to accommodate a stranger.”