swelling up before me in the deep, gray gloom of early dawn, I had decided
that my suggestion had been prompted by an intuition of truth. Brenda had
fallen under the spell of the moon, and gone for a long drive in the
motor. She had taken Banks with her, obviously; but that action need not
be presumed to have any romantic significance. And the Jervaises had
accepted that solution. They had been more convinced of its truth than I
had imagined. They would never have gone to bed, tired as they were, if
they had not been satisfied that Brenda had committed no other
indiscretion than that of indulging herself in the freak of a moonlight
drive. It had, certainly, been unduly prolonged; but, as old Jervaise had
said, there might be half a dozen reasons to account for that.

As I turned off the road and breasted the lower slopes of the hill, I was
constructing the details of the Jervaises' explanatory visit to the
Atkinsons. I had reached the point of making Mrs. Jervaise repeat the
statement she had made in the Hall that "dear Brenda was so impossibly
headstrong," when I heard the sweet, true notes of some one ahead of me,
whistling, almost miraculously, in tune.

It isn't one man in a million who can whistle absolutely true.




V

DAYBREAK


He was whistling Schubert's setting of "Who is Sylvia?" and as I climbed