"Certainly; and he has made his protest. But it doesn't do any good; the man keeps on spying, as you see. But we have wandered a long way from your book. I've been trying to prove to you that I am not fit to criticise it."
"No; you mustn't mistake me. I haven't been coming to you for criticism," was Griswold's rather incoherent reply; and when the talk threatened to lapse into the commonplaces, he took his leave. Oddly enough, as he thought, when he was unlatching the gate and had shifted one of the newly purchased automatic pistols from his hip pocket to an outside pocket of the light top-coat he was wearing, the shadowy figure under the lake-shading trees had disappeared.
It was only a few minutes after the lingering dinner guest had gone when the doctor came out on the porch, bringing his long-stemmed pipe for a bedtime whiff in the open air.
"You are losing your beauty sleep, little girl," he said, dropping into the chair lately occupied by the guest. "Did you find out anything more to-night?"
The daughter did not reply at once, and when she did there was a note of freshly summoned hardihood in her voice.
"We were both mistaken," she affirmed. "Coincidences are always likely to be misleading. I am sorry I told you about them. He has certainly been a present help in time of need to Edward."
"How did you reach your conclusion?" inquired the pipe smoker, upon whom the coincidences were still actively exerting their influence.
"It came out in the talk this evening. He has been rather ridiculously putting me upon a pedestal, trying to make me fit an ideal character in his book, I think. To prove to him that I am only human, I told him the story of what happened on the Belle Julie. And, to cap the climax, I pointed out our friend Mr. Broffin, who was on guard again—as usual—and told him who the house watcher was and what he wanted. It didn't affect him any more than it would any friend of the family. He was interested in the story as a story, and—and in its bearing upon me as a—as a life-experience. But that was all."
"You may be right; you probably are right," was the father's comment after a thoughtful whiff or two had intervened. "Just the same, I've looked up the dates in my case book: if your Gavitt man, escaping from the officers in St. Louis, had taken the first train for Wahaska, he would have reached here at precisely the same moment that the sick Mr. Griswold did. Also, he would have been careful to remove all the little tags and telltales from his brand-new clothes—which was what Mr. Griswold very evidently had done. Also, again, the amount of money which Mr. Griswold has put into the Raymer capital stock tallies to within ten thousand dollars of the amount your Gavitt fellow walked away with in New Orleans. Also, number three, Mr. Griswold acted very much like a man who had lost all he had in the world when I told him that Miss Grierson and I had found no money in his suit-cases; and——"
"That is the weak link in your chain, isn't it?" objected the daughter. "You remember he told me on the boat that he had lost the money?"