while the horizontal ones had creepers festooned over them. A door was
well concealed. But the tree? It was large, yet there could not be
room in it for more than one person, who would have to stand upright
and in a most uncomfortable position. The man himself had been before
it over an hour. How long had the lady been in the tree? He forgot
his lost cigar in trying to figure the problem out.

Mark Griffin had never liked problems. That was one reason why he
found himself now located in a stuffy New England inn just at the end
of the summer season when all the "boarders" had gone except himself
and the book agent.

Griffin himself, though the younger son of an Irish peer, had been born
in England. The home ties were not strong and when his brother
succeeded to the title and estates in Ireland Mark, who had inherited a
fortune from his mother, went to live with his powerful English
relatives. For a while he thought of going into the army, but he knew
he was a dunce in mathematics, so he soon gave up the idea. He tried
Oxford, but failed there for the same reason. Then he just drifted.
Now, still on the sunny side of thirty-five, he was knocking about,
sick of things, just existing, and fearfully bored. He had dropped
into Sihasset through sheer curiosity--just to see a typical New
England summer resort where the Yankee type had not yet entirely
disappeared. Now that the season was over he simply did not care to
pull out for New York and continue his trip to--nowhere. He was
"seeing" America. It might take months and it might take years. He
did not care. Then England again by way of Japan and Siberia--perhaps.
He never wanted to lose sight of that "perhaps," which was, after all,
his only guarantee of independence.