“What is this mystery? How am I concerned in it? For I am, and mystery there is. It is like that mist over the island, which I can see and feel but cannot touch. Pshaw! I’m getting sentimental, when I ought to be turning detective. Yet I couldn’t do that—pry into the private affairs of a man who’s treated me so generously. What shall I do? How can I go back there? But where else can I go?”
At thought that he might never return to the roof he had quitted, a curious homesickness seized him.
“Who’ll hunt what game they need? Who’ll catch their fish? Who’ll keep the garden growing? Where can I study the forest and its furry people, at first hand, as in the Hollow? And I was doing well. Not as I hope to do, but getting on. Margot was a merciless critic, but even she admitted that my last picture had the look, the spirit of the woods. That’s what I want to do, what Mr. Dutton, also, approved; to bring glimpses of these solitudes back to the cities and the thousands who can never see them in any other way. Well—let it go. I can’t stay and be a torment to anybody, and some time, in some other place, maybe—— Ah!”
What he had mistaken for the laughter of a loon was Pierre’s halloo. He was coming back, then, from the mainland where he had been absent these past days. Adrian was thankful. There was nothing mysterious or perplexing about Pierre, whose rule of life was extremely simple.
“Pierre first, second, and forever. After Pierre, if there was anything left, then—anybody, the nearest at hand;” would have expressed the situation; but his honest, unblushing selfishness was sometimes a relief.
“One always knows just where to find Pierre,” Margot had said.
So Adrian’s answering halloo was prompt, and turning about he watched the birch leaving the shadow of the forest and heading for himself. It was soon alongside and Ricord’s excited voice was shouting his good news:
“Run him up to seven hundred and fifty!”
“But I thought there wasn’t money enough anywhere to buy him!”